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165. The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens’ London

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Judith Flanders

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History

545 pages, published July 14, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Victorian City explores what it was like to live in the everyday world of Charles Dickens’ London.  From the time of his arrived in London in 1822, Charles Dickens obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties.   Judith Flanders, one of Britain’s foremost social historians, uses Dickens’ own words to lead us on a journey through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment hot spots of London in the 1800’s.  The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen.  Technology (railways, street-lighting, and sewers) transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction.

 

Quotes 

“Dickens’ London was a place of the mind, but it was also a real place.  Much of what we take today to be the marvellous imaginings of a visionary novelist turn out on inspection to be the reportage of a great observer.”

 

“the way that people lived was not Dickensian, merely life.”

 

“How are you off for soap?” or “What a shocking bad hat!”

 

My Take

While there are certainly some very interesting parts of The Victorian City, there is not enough to justify the length (545 pages) of this wordy tome.  I did learn a lot about London, a city that I love, and have a new appreciation for Charles Dickens (a writer I need to read more from), but I could have gotten all of this benefit in under 300 pages.

 

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160. Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Rob Walker

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Business, Psychology, Economics

261 pages, published January 1, 2008

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The themes of Buying In is that brands are dead, advertising no longer works, and consumers are in control.  Rob Walker argues that as a result, there has been an important cultural shift that includes a practice he calls murketing, in which people create brands of their own and participate in marketing campaigns for their favorites.  Rather than becoming immune to them, we are rapidly embracing brands.  Profiling Timberland, American Apparel, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Bull, iPod, and Livestrong, among others, Walker demonstrates the ways in which buyers adopt products not just as consumer choices but as conscious expressions of their identities.

 

My Take

I picked up Buying In off the shelf at a Malibu vacation rental we were staying at, having heard nothing about the book.  With swaths of free time and a four day deadline to read it, I managed to finish the book.  While I learned a few somewhat interesting things about marketing for different brands, the book barely held my attention.  If you work in the field of marketing and brands, then this book is for you.  If not, my advice is to skip it.

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158. An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Barbara Brown Taylor

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Theology, Christian, Memoir

216 pages, published February 10, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor shares how she learned to encounter God beyond the walls of any church.  From simple practices such as walking, working, and getting lost to deep meditations on topics like prayer and pronouncing blessings, Taylor reveals practical ways to discover the sacred in the small things we do and see. Something as ordinary as hanging clothes on a clothesline becomes an act of devotion if we pay attention to what we are doing and take time to attend to the sights, smells, and sounds around us.  Making eye contact with the cashier at the grocery store becomes a moment of true human connection. Allowing yourself to get lost leads to new discoveries.  All of her methods share a common theme of taking the time to step outside your normal routine and thoughtfully contemplate the myriad blessings that surround each and every one of us.

 

Quotes 

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”

 

“Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.”

 

“Whoever you are, you are human. Wherever you are, you live in the world, which is just waiting for you to notice the holiness in it.”

 

“Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?”

 

“People encounter God under shady oak trees, on riverbanks, at the tops of mountains, and in long stretches of barren wilderness. God shows up in whirlwinds, starry skies, burning bushes, and perfect strangers. When people want to know more about God, the son of God tells them to pay attention to the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, to women kneading bread and workers lining up for their pay. Whoever wrote this stuff believed that people could learn as much about the ways of God from paying attention to the world as they could from paying attention to scripture. What is true is what happens, even if what happens is not always right. People can learn as much about the ways of God from business deals gone bad or sparrows falling to the ground as they can from reciting the books of the Bible in order. They can learn as much from a love affair or a wildflower as they can from knowing the Ten Commandments by heart.”

 

“but I know that I have an easier time loving humankind than I do loving particular human beings.”

 

“Plato once said that pain restores order to the soul. Rumi said that it lops off the branches of indifference. “The throbbing vein / will take you further / than any thinking.”14 Whatever else it does, pain offers an experience of being human that is as elemental as birth, orgasm, love, and death. Because it is so real, pain is an available antidote to unreality—not the medicine you would have chosen, perhaps, but an effective one all the same. The next time you are in real pain, see how you feel about television shows, new appliances, a clean house, or your resumé. Chances are that none of these will do anything for you. All that will do anything for you is some cool water, held out by someone who has stopped everything else in order to look after you. An extra blanket might also help, a dry pillow, the simple knowledge that there is someone in the house who might hear you if you cried.”

 

“According to the Talmud, every blade of grass has its own angel bending over it, whispering, “Grow, grow.”

 

“All I am saying is that anyone can do this. Anyone can ask and anyone can bless, whether anyone has authorized you to do it or not. All I am saying is that the world needs you to do this, because there is a real shortage of people willing to kneel wherever they are and recognize the holiness holding its sometimes bony, often tender, always life-giving hand above their heads. That we are able to bless one another at all is evidence that we have been blessed, whether we can remember when or not. That we are willing to bless one another is miracle enough to stagger the very stars.”

 

“The great wisdom traditions of the world all recognize that the main impediment to living a life of meaning is being self-absorbed.”

 

“To see takes time, like having a friend takes time. It is as simple as turning off the television to learn the song of a single bird. Why should anyone do such things? I cannot imagine—unless one is weary of crossing days off the calendar with no sense of what makes the last day different from the next. Unless one is weary of acting in what feels more like a television commercial than a life. The practice of paying attention offers no quick fix for such weariness, with guaranteed results printed on the side. Instead, it is one way into a different way of life, full of treasure for those who are willing to pay attention to exactly where they are.”

 

“No one longs for what he or she already has, and yet the accumulated insight of those wise about the spiritual life suggests that the reason so many of us cannot see the red X that marks the spot is because we are standing on it. The treasure we seek requires no lengthy expedition, no expensive equipment, no superior aptitude or special company. All we lack is the willingness to imagine that we already have everything we need. The only thing missing is our consent to be where we are.”

 

“Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.”

 

“The problem is, many of the people in need of saving are in churches, and at least part of what they need saving from is the idea that God sees the world the same way they do.”

 

“What is saving my life now is the conviction that there is no spiritual treasure to be found apart from the bodily experiences of human life on earth. My life depends on engaging the most ordinary physical activities with the most exquisite attention I can give them. My life depends on ignoring all touted distinctions between the secular and the sacred, the physical and the spiritual, the body and the soul. What is saving my life now is becoming more fully human, trusting that there is no way to God apart from real life in the real world.”

 

“Whatever I decided to do for a living, it was not what I did but how I did it that mattered.”

 

“You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Those most likely to befriend strangers, in other words, are those who have been strangers themselves. The best way to grow empathy for those who are lost is to know what it means to be lost yourself.”

 

“Since some people consider being human a liability, and “fully” would only make things worse, I should perhaps explain what I mean. To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else’s hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that “I’m only human” does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. “The glory of God is a human being fully alive,” wrote Irenaeus of Lyons some two thousand years ago. One of the reasons I remain a Christian-in-progress is the peculiar Christian insistence that God is revealed in humankind—not just in human form but also in human being.”

 

My Take

An Alter in the World planted a wonderful idea in my brain, i.e., we should not just worship God in church, but should worship Him in everything that we encounter and experience, including nature, our bodies, work, suffering, and most of all in other people.  In a very accessible manner, Taylor relates how we can find God and joy in all things, especially in our humanness.  I got a lot out of this book and will keep it in mind for a future re-read.

 

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151. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Bryson

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Travel, Memoir, Humor

397 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Walk in the Woods is Bill Bryson’s memoir of his more than 500 miles of hiking the Appalachian Trail or AT as it is often referred to.  The AT stretches from Georgia to Maine and covers some of the most beautiful terrain in America–majestic mountains, silent forests, sparking lakes.  If you want to do a major hike in the U.S., it’s probably the place to go.  Bill Bryson introduces the reader to the history and ecology of the trail and to some of the other characters that he meets along the way.

 

Quotes

“Black bears rarely attack.  But here’s the thing. Sometimes they do.  All bears are agile, cunning and immensely strong, and they are always hungry. If they want to kill you and eat you, they can, and pretty much whenever they want. That doesn’t happen often, but – and here is the absolutely salient point – once would be enough.”

 

“I was especially riveted by an amateur photograph in Herrero’s book, taken late at night by a camper with a flash at a campground out West. The photograph caught four black bears as they puzzled over a suspended food bag. The bears were clearly startled but not remotely alarmed by the flash. It was not the size or demeanor of the bears that troubled me — they looked almost comically unagressive, like four guys who had gotten a Frisbee caught up a tree — but their numbers. Up to that moment it had not occurred to me that bears might prowl in parties. What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties — I daresay it would even give a merry toot — and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

 

“To my surprise, I felt a certain springy keenness. I was ready to hike. I had waited months for this day, after all, even if it had been mostly with foreboding. I wanted to see what was out there. All over America today people would be dragging themselves to work, stuck in traffic jams, wreathed in exhaust smoke. I was going for a walk in the woods. I was more than ready for this.”

 

“You have no engagements, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants; you exist in a tranquil tedium, serenely beyond the reach of exasperation, “far removed from the seats of strife,” as the early explorer and botanist William Bartram put it. All that is required of you is a willingness to trudge.”

 

“Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It’s quite wonderful, really.”

 

“Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

 

“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.”

 

“At times, you become almost certain that you slabbed this hillside three days ago, crossed this stream yesterday, clambered over this fallen tree at least twice today already. But most of the time you don’t think. No point. Instead, you exist in a kind of mobile Zen mode, your brain like a balloon tethered with string, accompanying but not actually part of the body below. Walking for hours and miles becomes as automatic, as unremarkable, as breathing. At the end of the day you don’t think, “Hey, I did sixteen miles today,” any more than you think, “Hey, I took eight-thousand breaths today.” It’s just what you do.”

 

“I know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why she didn’t walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as if I were being willfully provocative. ‘Because I have a program for the treadmill,’ she explained. ‘It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty.’ It hadn’t occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.”

 

“I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.”

 

“Everywhere throughout New England you find old, tumbledown field walls, often in the middle of the deepest, most settled- looking woods- a reminder of just how swiftly nature reclaims the land in America.”

 

“That’s the trouble with losing your mind; by the time it’s gone, it’s too late to get it back.”

 

“In America, alas, beauty has become something you drive to, and nature an either/or proposition–either you ruthlessly subjugate it, as at Tocks Dam and a million other places, or you deify it, treat it as something holy and remote, a thing apart, as along the Appalachian Trail. Seldom would it occur to anyone on either side that people and nature could coexist to their mutual benefit–that, say, a more graceful bridge across the Delaware River might actually set off the grandeur around it, or that the AT might be more interesting and rewarding if it wasn’t all wilderness, if from time to time it purposely took you past grazing cows and till fields.”

 

“But I got a great deal else from the experience. I learned to pitch a tent and sleep beneath the stars. For a brief, proud period I was slender and fit. I gained a profound respect for the wilderness and nature and the benign dark power of woods. I understand now, in a way I never did before, the colossal scale of the world. I found patience and fortitude that I didn’t know I had. I discovered an America that millions of people scarcely know exists. I made a friend. I came home.”

 

My Take

I listened to A Walk in the Woods right before my husband Scot and I left to hike the Camino de Santiago de Compostela in Northern Spain.  Fortunately for me, I was doing the “minimum Camino” of 5 days and 114 kilometers.  We also had a luggage transport service, so all we had to carry were day packs with water, jackets and a few other items.  Our hike was nothing like the grueling experience described by Bill Bryson.  While he didn’t make the case to me for the hard core experience of hiking the AT (I’m happy just doing the minimum Camino), I’m sure that heartier souls will be inspired by Bryson’s vivid descriptions and humor in this very readable book.

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150. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Politics

480 pages, published April 18, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A very timely book when I read it, Shattered is an insider’s account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for the Presidency during the 2016 election against Donald Trump.  How could she lose?  To Donald Trump of all people?  Hint:  it wasn’t just the James Comey revelations or Russian meddling.  Shattered takes the reader behind the scenes of a sure thing gone off the rails.  No explanation of defeat of this magnitude can begin with anything other than the core problem of Hillary’s campaign–the candidate herself.   Political writers Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes have reconstructed the key decisions and unseized opportunities, the well-intentioned misfires and the hidden thorns that turned a winnable contest into a devastating loss.  It shows how Hillary herself made victory an uphill battle, how her difficulty articulating a vision irreparably hobbled her impact with voters, and how the campaign failed to internalize the lessons of populist fury from the hard-fought primary against Bernie Sanders.

 

Quotes

“She’d gone on the attack against a better-liked rival whose platform more closely mirrored the values of the party’s base, creating a boomerang effect on her personal standing.”

 

“Hillary’s campaign was so spirit-crushing that her aides eventually shorthanded the feeling of impending doom with a simple mantra: We’re not allowed to have nice things.”

 

“I don’t understand what’s happening with the country. I can’t get my arms around it,” Hillary confided. Moore just listened. “How do I get answers to this?” Hillary asked. It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign. After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn’t figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“But the idea burned into her mind as much as anything else was that she had lost because she’d hired people who put their own interests above getting her elected.”

 

“But more important, the scapegoating tone and tenor revealed that the Clintons were either living on another planet or at least having emotional and intellectual difficulty coming to terms with the reality that only Hillary was culpable and only Hillary could turn things around.”

 

“Nor was anyone empowered to both enforce Hillary’s will and tell her when she was wrong without fear of reprisal.”

 

“Hillary didn’t have a vision to articulate. And no one else could give one to her.”

 

“All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it. Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn’t really have a rationale.”

 

“the summer of 2008, years before her private e-mail server became a campaign issue, Hillary learned about the power of digital snooping. At the time, she was conducting an autopsy of her failed bid against Barack Obama, and she wanted an honest accounting of what had gone wrong. So she instructed a trusted aide to access the campaign’s server and download the messages sent and received by top staffers.”

 

“Mook was already operating inside a framework first developed for Hillary by David Plouffe, President Barack Obama’s longtime strategist, who had put together a preliminary memo for Hillary in December 2013. As Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, Plouffe had despised Clinton; that he was now advising her was an important signal of just how completely she would co-opt the Democratic establishment even before she began running.”

 

“Hillary’s aides didn’t need to wonder why her economic message wasn’t breaking through. It wasn’t rocket science. She hadn’t told the truth to the public about her e-mails, and she was under federal investigation.”

 

“Running like an incumbent from the outset, Hillary had geared her whole campaign toward depriving any other Democrat of the institutional support necessary to mount a challenge, from donors to superdelegates. She wanted other Democrats to be afraid to run against her, or to support any would-be rivals.”

 

“After the 2008 campaign, two of her aides, Kris Balderston and Adrienne Elrod, had toiled to assign loyalty scores to members of Congress, ranging from one for the most loyal to seven for those who had committed the most egregious acts of treachery. Bill Clinton had campaigned against some of the sevens in subsequent primary elections, helping to knock them out of office. The fear of retribution was not lost on the remaining sevens, some of whom rushed to endorse Hillary early in the 2016 cycle.”

 

“There was a certain duality to Hillary’s vast political empire: while it was true that most of the voices inside and outside the campaign had something valuable to contribute, when taken together, they were cacophonous. Rarely did everyone agree on a particular course of action, and often the counsel Hillary got came with the baggage of the adviser’s agenda in maintaining good relations with the candidate or trying to make a rival look bad.”

 

“She believed her campaign had failed her—not the other way around—and she wanted “to see who was talking to who, who was leaking to who,”

 

“No, Schale explained, Trump’s numbers weren’t just big, they were unreal. In rural Polk County, smack-dab in the center of the state, Hillary would collect 3,000 more votes than Obama did in 2012—but Trump would add more than 25,000 votes to Mitt Romney’s total. In Pasco County, a swath of suburbs north of Tampa–St. Petersburg, Trump outran Romney by 30,000 votes. Pasco was one of the counties Schale was paying special attention to because the Tampa area tended to attract retirees from the Rust Belt—folks whose political leanings reflected those of hometowns in the industrial Midwest.”

 

“In the end, though, this was a winnable race for Hillary. Her own missteps—from setting up a controversial private e-mail server and giving speeches to Goldman Sachs to failing to convince voters that she was with them and turning her eyes away from working-class whites—gave Donald Trump the opportunity he needed to win.”

 

My Take

I have always had a keen interest in politics and having closely followed the twists and turns of the 2016 election, I very much looked forward to reading Shattered.  I was not disappointed.  Given unprecedented insider access to Hillary’s campaign, authors and political reporters Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes weave a compelling tale of the unfolding disaster.  While everyone I know was shocked on election night that Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton (and it wasn’t even that close), after reading Shattered, this result does not seem all that unlikely.  Trump had his problems, but Hillary had them too.  And apparently hers were bigger.

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149. The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

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

258 pages, published October 25, 1995

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Millionaire Next Door is a compilation of research on the profiles of American millionaires (i.e., U.S. households with net-worths exceeding one million dollars).  The authors compare the behavior of those they call UAWs (Under Accumulators of Wealth) and those who are PAWs (Prodigious Accumulator of Wealth).  A $250,000 per year doctor is an “Under Accumulator of Wealth” if his/her net worth is less than the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  For example, a 50-year-old doctor earning $250,000 should have about $1.25 million in net worth (50*250,000*10%). If her net worth is lower, she is an “Under Accumulator.”  People are usually UAW’s because they are more focused on consuming their earnings than on saving them.  In comparison, PAW’s accumulate usually well over the product of their age and one tenth of his/her realized pretax income.  Living as a PAW is how most people end up as millionaires.  Most of the millionaire households profiled lived below their means, did not have extravagant lifestyles and spent little on purchases such things as cars, watches, clothing, and other luxury products/services.

 

Quotes

Whatever your income, always live below your means.”

 

“Wealth is not the same as income. If you make a good income each year and spend it all, you are not getting wealthier. You are just living high. Wealth is what you accumulate, not what you spend.”

 

“I am not impressed with what people own. But I’m impressed with what they achieve. I’m proud to be a physician. Always strive to be the best in your field…. Don’t chase money. If you are the best in your field, money will find you.”

 

“Good health, longevity, happiness, a loving family, self-reliance, fine friends … if you [have] five, you’re a rich man….”

 

“Wealth is more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work, perseverance, planning, and, most of all, self-discipline.”

 

“It’s easier to accumulate wealth if you don’t live in a high-status neighborhood.”

 

“If you’re not yet wealthy but want to be someday, never purchase a home that requires a mortgage that is more than twice your household’s total annual realized income.”

 

“Money should never change one’s values…. Making money is only a report card. It’s a way to tell how you’re doing.”

 

“it is very difficult for a married couple to accumulate wealth if one is a spendthrift. A household divided in its financial orientation is unlikely to accumulate significant wealth.”

 

“How can well-educated, high-income people be so naive about money? Because being a well-educated, high-income earner does not automatically translate into financial independence. It takes planning and sacrificing.”

 

“Most people will never become wealthy in one generation if they are married to people who are wasteful. A couple cannot accumulate wealth if one of its members is a hyperconsumer.”

 

“Have you ever noticed those people whom you see jogging day after day? They are the ones who seem not to need to jog. But that’s why they are fit. Those who are wealthy work at staying financially fit. But those who are not financially fit do little to change their status.”

 

“It’s amazing what you can do when you set your mind to it. You’ll be surprised how many sales calls you can make when you have no alternative except to succeed.”

 

“There is an inverse relationship between the time spent purchasing luxury items such as cars and clothes and the time spent planning one’s financial future.”

 

“The median (typical) household in America has a net worth of less than $15,000, excluding home equity. Factor out equity in motor vehicles, furniture, and such, and guess what? More often than not the household has zero financial assets, such as stocks and bonds. How long could the average American household survive economically without a monthly check from an employer?  Perhaps a month or two in most cases. Even those in the top quintile are not really wealthy. Their median household net worth is less than $150,000. Excluding home equity, the median net worth for this group falls to less than $60,000. And what about our senior citizens? Without Social Security benefits, almost one-half of Americans over sixty-five would live in poverty.

 

“America is still the land of opportunity. Over the past thirty years I have consistently found that 80 to 85 percent of millionaires are self-made.”

 

“Interestingly, self-employed people make up less than 20 percent of the workers in America but account for two-thirds of the millionaires.”

 

“It is easier to purchase products that denote superiority than to actually be superior in economic achievement.”

 

“Mr. Denzi can teach us all something about accumulating wealth. Begin earning and investing early in your adult life. That will enable you to outpace the wealth accumulation levels of even the so-called gifted kids from your high school class. Remember, wealth is blind.”

 

“They became millionaires by budgeting and controlling expenses, and they maintain their affluent status the same way.”

 

My Take

When I was in my early 20’s, my Dad sat me down with an HP financial calculator and demonstrated to me what he called “the magic of compound interest.”  He showed me that if I started a regular program of saving and investing, I could grow my money to a sizable amount.  His advice clicked with me and after almost 30 years of following that simple formula, along with taking some calculated risks, I can happily report that this simple wealth accumulation system works.

The advice given to me by my father is the same advice supplied in The Millionaire Next Door, a classic in the personal finance world.  The basic message is that it is not what you make, but what you keep that matters.  The authors provide numerous examples of high earning professionals who have little to show financially after a lifetime of work.  On the flip side, more modest earners are able to build up sizeable net worths because they live below their means and regularly invest their savings.  This is an important message, especially to young people just starting out in life.  I encourage parents to give their kids a copy of this book, or at least share some of these basic principles with them.

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146. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Boulder Librarian

Author:   Mary Roach

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science, Medicine

320 pages, published 2003

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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145. The Case for Christ

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  My Bible Study Group

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Christian, Theology

367 pages, published August 30, 1998

Reading Format:  Hoopla Audio Book

 

Summary

Retracing his own spiritual journey from atheism to faith, Lee Strobel, former legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, searches for evidence that Jesus of Nazareth really is the Son of God.   As part of his investigation, he cross-examines a dozen experts with doctorates from schools like Cambridge and Princeton who are recognized authorities in their fields.  Strobel challenges them to defend the reliability of the New Testament and asks for evidence of Jesus’ existence outside the Bible.  He also delves into the question of whether the resurrection was an actual event.

 

Quotes

“Only in a world where faith is difficult can faith exist. I don’t have faith in two plus two equals four or in the noonday sun. Those are beyond question. But Scripture describes God as a hidden God. You have to make an effort of faith to find him. There are clues you can follow. “And if that weren’t so, if there were something more or less than clues, it’s difficult for me to understand how we could really be free to make a choice about him. If we had absolute proof instead of clues, then you could no more deny God than you could deny the sun. If we had no evidence at all, you could never get there. God gives us just enough evidence so that those who want him can have him. Those who want to follow the clues will.”

 

“if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.”

 

“The overthrowing of slavery, then, is through the transformation of men and women by the gospel rather than through merely changing an economic system. We’ve all seen what can happen when you merely overthrow an economic system and impose a new order. The whole communist dream was the have a ‘revolutionary man’ followed by the ‘new man.’ Trouble is, they never found the ‘new man.’ They got rid of the oppressors of the peasants, but that didn’t mean the peasants were suddenly free–they were just under a new regime of darkness. In the final analysis, if you want lasting change, you’ve got to transform the hearts of human beings. And that was Jesus’ mission.”

 

“Over and over Lapides would come upon prophecies in the Old Testament–more than four dozen major predictions in all. Isaiah revealed the manner of the Messiah’s birth (of a virgin); Micah pinpointed the place of his birth (Bethlehem); Genesis and Jeremiah specified his ancestry (a descendent of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from the tribe of Judah, the house of David); the Psalms foretold his betrayal, his accusation by false witnesses, his manner of death (pierced in the hands and feet, although crucifixion hadn’t been invented yet), and his resurrection (he would not decay but would ascend on high)…”

 

“The Jews proposed the ridiculous story that the guards had fallen asleep. Obviously, they were grasping at straws. But the point is this: they started with the assumption that the tomb was vacant! Why? Because they knew it was!”

 

“Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus Christ in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived several decades earlier, and they name names—crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was the high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried his cross, for example. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories about what supposedly happened ‘once upon a time.”

 

“The theological truth is based on historical truth. That’s the way the New Testament talks. Look at the sermon of Peter in the second chapter of Acts. He stands up and says, ‘You guys are a witness of these things; they weren’t done in secret.  David’s tomb is still with us, but God has raised Jesus from the dead.  Therefore we proclaim him to be the Son of God.’ “Take away miracles and you take away the Resurrection, and then you’ve got nothing to proclaim.  Paul said that if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, our faith is futile, it’s useless, it’s empty.”

 

“Back at my motel, I mentally played back my interview with Boyd. I felt the same way he did: If the Jesus of faith is not also the Jesus of history, he’s powerless and he’s meaningless. Unless he’s rooted in reality, unless he established his divinity by rising from the dead, he’s just a feel-good symbol who’s as irrelevant as Santa Claus.”

 

“So if someone were to say he was God, that wouldn’t have made any sense to them and would have been seen as clear-cut blasphemy. And it would have been counterproductive to Jesus in his efforts to get people to listen to his message.”

 

“believe in Jesus on the basis of the historical evidence, but my relationship with Jesus goes way beyond the evidence. I have to put my trust in him and walk with him on a daily basis.”

 

My Take

Reading The Case for Christ helped me meet one of my 2017 resolutions, to read 10 books on Christianity and faith.  While I have had doubts throughout my life about the existence of Jesus and God, I have always been a seeker of both.  I find that my faith is the strongest when I practice it on a regular basis and strive to learn more about Jesus and God.  Strobel’s book tackles the existence questions head on and offers persuasive empirical evidence that not only did Jesus exist, but that he was truly the son of God who was resurrected from the the dead.  I’m not sure the impact this book would have on a hard-core atheist, but for those open to hearing his arguments, Strobel makes a compelling and credible case for the existence of Jesus and God.

 

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141. Desire of the Everlasting Hills

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Beth Roach

Author:   Thomas Cahill

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Theology, Christian

368 pages, published 1997

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In Desire of the Everlasting Hills, historian Thomas Cahill explores the impact of Jesus Christ on Western civilization and ascertain whether Jesus made a difference.  His answer is unequivocal.  Introducing us first to “the people Jesus knew,” Cahill describes the oppressive Roman political presence, the pervasive Greek cultural influence, and the widely varied social and religious context of the Judaism at the time when Jesus lived.  These backgrounds, essential to a complete understanding of Jesus, lead to the author’s original interpretation of the New Testament.  We see Jesus as a real person who is haunted by his inevitable crucifixion, the cruelest form of execution ever devised by humankind. Mary is a vivid presence and forceful influence on her son. And the apostle Paul, the carrier of Jesus’ message and most important figure in the early Jesus movement (which became Christianity), finds rehabilitation in Cahill’s realistic, revealing portrait of him.

 

Quotes

“Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for another.”

 

“In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a clutter of gods and goddesses and pro forma rituals that almost nobody took seriously anymore. They actually believed in their one God; and, imagine, they even set aside one day a week to pray to him and reflect on their lives. They possessed a dignified library of sacred books that they studied reverently as part of this weekly reflection and which, if more than a little odd in their Greek translation, seemed to point toward a consistent worldview. Besides their religious seriousness, Jews were unusual in a number of ways that caught the attention of gentiles. They were faithful spouses—no, really—who maintained strong families in which even grown children remained affectively attached and respectful to their parents. Despite Caesar Nero’s shining example, matricide was virtually unknown among them. Despite their growing economic success, they tended to be more scrupulous in business than non-Jews. And they were downright finicky when it came to taking human life, seeming to value even a slave’s or a plebeian’s life as much as anyone else’s. Perhaps in nothing did the gentiles find the Jews so admirable as in their acts of charity. Communities of urban Jews, in addition to opening synagogues, built welfare centers for aiding the poor, the miserable, the sick, the homebound, the imprisoned, and those, such as widows and orphans, who had no family to care for them. For all these reasons, the diaspora cities of the first century saw a marked increase in gentile initiates to Judaism.”

 

“That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who “make a desolation and call it peace”) at the expense of hapless conquered peoples, would also not have carried much weight with most readers. Hadn’t Philip of Macedon’s first conquest been the seizure of the Balkan gold mines? Hadn’t Alexander’s last planned campaign been for the sake of controlling the lucrative Arabian spice trade? How could anyone demur over such things? What would be the point of holding out against the nature of man and of the universe itself? Augustus set up in the midst of the Roman Forum a statue of himself that loomed eleven times the size of a normal man,10 and similarly awesome statues were erected in central shrines throughout the empire. Augustus was not a normal man; he was a god, deserving of worship. And, like all gods, he was terrifying.”

 

“Alexander was, therefore, “the Great,” the greatest man who had ever lived. If Plato was the measure of all subsequent philosophy and Phidias of all attempts to carve a man in marble, Alexander was the measure of man himself. We may think such a value system outmoded or remote, but it was not so long ago that Napolean enchanted Europe in his quest to be the modern Alexander, nor were such values unknown to the generals and kommandants of the twentieth century, and God knows they continue to infect the brains of all those who take up weapons of destruction in what they believe to be a noble cause. Indeed, down the whole course of history, the invincible warrior with raised sword has been the archetypal hero of the human race.”

“since a Samaritan as the model of Christ-like behavior would rub so many Jewish Christians the wrong way? But Luke’s gentile Christians needed to be reassured that there was more than one way to be Christ-like, more than one path that could be taken if you would follow in the footsteps of the Master. You needn’t be a born Jew, raised in the traditions of the ancestors. There was no background that was unthinkable: it was even possible to be something as freaky as a Samaritan. As we stand now at the entrance to the third millennium since Jesus, we can look back over the horrors of Christian history, never doubting for an instant that if Christians had put kindness ahead of devotion to good order, theological correctness, and our own justifications—if we had followed in the humble footsteps of a heretical Samaritan who was willing to wash someone else’s wounds, rather than in the self-regarding steps of the priest and the immaculate steps of the levite—the world we inhabit would be a very different one.”

 

“To the Greek mind, the unwillingness to compromise in religious matters—which were not all that important, anyway—was impious, unpatriotic, maybe even seditious. For the Jews, religion was the Way of Life; it had nothing in common with the empty rituals of the Greeks.”

 

My Take

While a bit dense at times, Desire of the Everlasting Hills is an interesting read.  With discussions of Alexander the Great, the Greeks and the Roman Empire, Cahill lays the foundation for the world entered by Jesus and shows how truly disruptive Christ and the new Christians were to the old order.  I have always enjoyed history and am particularly interested in learning more about Jesus.  Desire of the Everlasting Hills fulfills both of these pursuits and is worthy of reading.

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136. A Life in Parts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bryan Cranston

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

271 pages, published October 11, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

A Life in Parts is the memoir of Bryan Cranston, star of Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad.  Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial.  While he loved acting from a young age, after his father left the family, it took a back seat to survival.  A Life in Parts follows Cranston’s journey from an abandoned son to a successful television and movie star by recalling the many odd parts he’s played in real life—paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father.  While Cranston starred in a soap opera, played the unforgettable Dentist Tim Whatley on Seinfeld, created the indelible dad Hal Wilkerson on Malcolm in the Middle, he will always be best remembered for his portrayal of Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin, on Breaking Bad.  Cranston relates the grittiest details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most memorable performances ever captured on screen.  Finally, Cranston gives an in depth account of how he prepared, physically and mentally, for the challenging role of President Lyndon Johnson, a tour de force that won him a Tony to go along with his four Emmys.

Quotes

 “I will pursue something that I love — and hopefully become good at it, instead of pursuing something that I’m good at — but don’t love.”

 

“The greatest thing about youth is that you’re not yet battle-weary, so you’ll try anything.”

 

“Console the failure, but nurture the hunger.”

 

“The best teacher is experience. Find the educational in every situation.”

 

My Take

I found A Life in Parts to be a fascinating read.  Breaking Bad is my husband’s favorite show of all time and it is in my top five, so I was already a fan of Cranston’s when I started his memoir.  He takes the reader on a journey through his hardscrabble, chaotic life in which his clear sense that he wanted to be an actor and his devotion to always improving his craft carried him through many hard times and setbacks to the success that he enjoys today.  Even before he was famous, Cranston’s life provided lots of great content for a memoir.  It also doesn’t hurt that he is a very fine writer.  Even if you are not interested in being an actor, there are many lessons to be learned from Cranston’s work ethic.

 

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