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197. Days Without End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Sebastian Barry

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction, Western

259 pages, published January 24, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary

Days Without End is a western set in the middle of the 1800’s, during the American Indian and Civil Wars.  It is narrated by seventeen year old Thomas McNulty who fled Ireland’s Great Famine for a better life in America.  Thomas, along with his best friend and lover John Cole, joins the U.S. Army in the 1850s.  The men witness repeated cruelties, but rely on each other for love and create a family with a young Sioux girl.

 

Quotes 

“Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending, but something that would go on forever, all rested and stopped in that moment. Hard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you never had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I am thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now.”

 

“There’s no soldier don’t have a queer little spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that’s just a fact. Maybe only on account of him being alive in the same place and the same time and we are all just customers of the same three-card trickster.”

 

“A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.”

 

“Things that give you heart are rare enough, better note them in your head when you find them and not forget.”

 

“Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards.”

 

“It’s a dark thing when the world sets no value on you and your kin, and then Death comes stalking in, in his bloody boots.”

 

“The men hunched around, talking with the gaiety of souls about to eat plentifully, with the empty dark country about us, and the strange fabric of frost and frozen wind falling on our shoulders, and the great black sky of stars above us like a huge tray of gems and diamonds.”

 

“Gods work! Silence so great it hurts your ears, colour so bright it hurts your staring eyes. A vicious ruined class of man could cry at such scenes because it seems to tell him that his life is not approved. The remnant of innocence burns in his breast like a ember of the very sun.”

 

My Take

While I am typically not a big fan of the Western genre, I did really enjoy Days Without End which received numerous accolades:  Man Booker Prize Nominee for Longlist, Costa Book Award for Novel, Andrew Carnegie Medal Nominee for Fiction, Walter Scott Prize, Costa Book of the Year and HWA Endeavour Ink Gold Crown Nominee for Longlist.  While Barry vividly captures the rough and tumble of war time America in the middle of the 19th Century, the compelling part of his story are the characters of Thomas McNulty and John Cole who start a relationship when they are both hired to dress up as women and dance with miners.  As the story progresses, the reader is impressed with their fundamental decency during an indecent time and their affection for each other and the Indian girl they save and adopt.  Recommended.

 

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193. The Last Tudor

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Philippa Gregory

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

528 pages, published August 8, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Last Tudor tells the stories of three Grey sisters:  Jane, Katherine and Mary.  The great-granddaughter of Henry VII through his younger daughter Mary Tudor, Jane was a first cousin once removed of Edward VI, Henry VIII’s only male heir who was King of England and Ireland in 1547.  When Edward VI died at 15 years old, Jane served as queen of England for nine days after Edward VI wrote in his will that his successor should be Jane, partly because his half-sister Mary was Roman Catholic while Jane was Protestant and would support the religion whose foundation Edward claimed to have laid.  Edward’s will named his half-sisters Mary (daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon) and Elizabeth (daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boelyn) as illegitimate and removed them from succession.  When the country’s allegiance switched to Mary, Jane was tried for treason and beheaded.  Jane’s sister Katherine Grey was the beauty of the family who earned the lifelong hatred of her cousin Elizabeth I when she married Edward Seymour for love.  Under four feet tall, the third sister Mary Grey was an extraordinary little person known as a dwarf in Tudor times, who defied Elizabeth to marry the tallest man at court in her own secret love match.

 

Quotes 

“You don’t get to be a favorite at a tyrant’s court without beheading your principles every day.”

 

My Take

Philippa Gregory, master storyteller and premier writer of historical fiction, has once again woven a fascinating tale that continues the stories of Elizabeth and Mary, the two daughters of Henry VIII.  In The Last Tudor, we get a different view of Elizabeth I who is portrayed as a tyrant who was constantly worried about losing her throne, especially to Mary Queen of Scots, and who was vindictively jealous of her prettier and happier cousin Katherine Grey.  As with all Philippa Gregory novels that I have read during my quest (The Queen’s Fool, The Taming of the Queen, The Kingmakers Daughter) I thoroughly enjoyed the rich details of the period and the compelling character studies of historical figures.

 

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190. The Sparrow

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Doria Russell

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Theology

431 pages, published September 8, 1997

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In the year 2019, we find proof of extraterrestrial life when a listening post picks up exquisite singing from a planet that will come to be known as Rakhat.  While the UN debate and try to figure out what to do, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition.  The journey to and the discoveries on Rakhat lead the crew to ponder the meaning of life and God.

Quotes 

“There’s an old Jewish story that says in the beginning God was everywhere and everything, a totality. But to make creation, God had to remove Himself from some part of the universe, so something besides Himself could exist. So He breathed in, and in the places where God withdrew, there creation exists.”

So God just leaves?”

No. He watches. He rejoices. He weeps. He observes the moral drama of human life and gives meaning to it by caring passionately about us, and remembering.”

Matthew ten, verse twenty-nine: Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing it.”

But the sparrow still falls.”

 

“The Jewish sages also tell us that God dances when His children defeat Him in argument, when they stand on their feet and use their minds. So questions like Anne’s are worth asking. To ask them is a very fine kind of human behavior. If we keep demanding that God yield up His answers, perhaps some day we will understand them. And then we will be something more than clever apes, and we shall dance with God.”

 

“I believe in God the way I believe in quarks. People whose business it is to know about quantum physics or religion tell me they have good reason to believe that quarks and God exist. And they tell me that if I wanted to devote my life to learning what they’ve learned, I’d find quarks and God just like they did.”

 

“Faced with the Divine, people took refuge in the banal, as though answering a cosmic multiple-choice question: If you saw a burning bush, would you (a) call 911, (b) get the hot dogs, or (c) recognize God? A vanishingly small number of people would recognize God, Anne had decided years before, and most of them had simply missed a dose of Thorazine.”

 

“I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently.”

 

“See that’s where it falls apart for me!” Anne cried. “What sticks in my throat is that God gets the credit but never the blame. I just can’t swallow that kind of theological candy. Either God’s in charge or he’s not…”

 

“There are times…when we are in the midst of life-moments of confrontation with birth or death, or moments of beauty when nature or love is fully revealed, or moments of terrible loneliness-times when a holy and awesome awareness comes upon us. It may come as deep inner stillness or as a rush of overflowing emotion. It may seem to come from beyond us, without any provocation, or from within us, evoked by music or by a sleeping child. If we open our hearts at such moments, creation reveals itself to us in all it’s unity and fullness. And when we return from such a moment of awareness, our hearts long to find some way to capture it in words forever, so that we can remain faithful to it’s higher truth ….When my people search for a name to give to the truth we feel at those moments, we call it God, and when we capture that understanding in timeless poetry, we call it praying.”

 

“That is my dilemma. Because if I was led by God to love God, step by step, as it seemed, if I accept that the beauty and the rapture were real and true, the rest of it was God’s will too, and that, gentlemen, is cause for bitterness. But if I am simply a deluded ape who took a lot of old folktales far too seriously, then I brought all this on myself and my companions and the whole business becomes farcical, doesn’t it. The problem with atheism, I find, under these circumstances…is that I have no one to despise but myself. If, however, I choose to believe that God is vicious, then at least I have the solace of hating God.”

 

“Watching him with one eye, she wondered if men ever figured out that they were more appealing when they were pursuing their own work than when they were pursuing a woman.”

 

“You know what’s the most terrifying thing about admitting that you’re in love? You are just naked. You put yourself in harm’s way and you lay down all your defenses. No clothes, no weapons. Nowhere to hide. Completely vulnerable. The only thing that makes it tolerable is to believe that the other person loves you back…”

 

“we all make vows, Jimmy. And there is something very beautiful and touching and noble about wanting good impulses to be permanent and true forever,” she said. “Most of us stand up and vow to love, honor and cherish someone. And we truly mean it, at the time. But two or twelve or twenty years down the road, the lawyers are negotiating the property settlement.”

“You and George didn’t go back on your promises.”

She laughed. “Lemme tell ya something, sweetface. I have been married at least four times, to four different men.” She watched him chew that over for a moment before continuing, “They’ve all been named George Edwards but, believe me, the man who is waiting for me down the hall is a whole lot different animal from the boy I married, back before there was dirt. Oh, there are continuities. He has always been fun and he has never been able to budget his time properly and – well, the rest is none of your business.”

“But people change,” he said quietly.

“Precisely. People change. Cultures change. Empires rise and fall. Shit. Geology changes! Every ten years or so, George and I have faced the fact that we have changed and we’ve had to decide if it makes sense to create a new marriage between these two new people.” She flopped back against her chair. “Which is why vows are such a tricky business. Because nothing stays the same forever. Okay. Okay! I’m figuring something out now.” She sat up straight, eyes focused somewhere outside the room, and Jimmy realized that even Anne didn’t have all the answers and that was either the most comforting thing he’d learned in a long time or the most discouraging. “Maybe because so few of us would be able to give up something so fundamental for something so abstract, we protect ourselves from the nobility of a priest’s vows by jeering at him when he can’t live up to them, always and forever.” She shivered and slumped suddenly, “But, Jimmy! What unnatural words. Always and forever! Those aren’t human words, Jim. Not even stones are always and forever.”

 

“The poor you will always have with you,’ Jesus said. A warning, Emilio wondered, or an indictment?”

 

“It is the human condition to ask questions like Anne’s last night and to receive no plain answers,” he said. “Perhaps this is because we can’t understand the answers, because we are incapable of knowing God’s ways and God’s thoughts. We are, after all, only very clever tailless primates, doing the best we can, but limited. Perhaps we must all own up to being agnostic, unable to know the unknowable.”

 

“Consider the Star of David,” he said quietly. “Two triangles, one pointing down, one pointing up. I find this a powerful image—the Divine reaching down, humanity reaching upward. And in the center, an intersection, where the Divine and human meet. The Mass takes place in that space.” His eyes lifted and met hers: a look of lucid candor. “I understand it as a place where the Divine and the human are one. And as a promise, perhaps. That God will reach toward us if we reach toward Him, that we and our most ordinary human acts—like eating bread and drinking wine—can be transformed and made sacred.”

 

My Take

When I started The Sparrow, I was expecting a science fiction story, a genre I hadn’t read in awhile.  While there is plenty of science fiction to keep the reader interested, there is a lot more to this book.  Against the backdrop of a journey and investigation of another planet inhabited by intelligent life, Author Mary Doria Russell explores the eternal question of the meaning of God and how we, as “clever apes,” are meant to relate to Him.  A fascinating and thought provoking book.

 

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189. The Girl with all the Gifts

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   M.R. Carey

Genre:  Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia, Horror

460 pages, published June 19, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Girl with all the Gifts is set in a bleak future after most of humanity has succumbed to a pathogenic fungus that has turned most people into “hungries” who have an insatiable desire to eat what is left of the human race and pass along the disease.  Dr. Caldwell believes that a group of hungry children who are kept bound to their chairs at all times, especially the incredibly intelligent Melanie, hold the key to combating the deadly pandemic.  However, Melanie is much more than a test subject, especially in the view of Miss Justineau, her favorite teacher with whom she has bonded.

 

Quotes 

“The truth is the truth, the only prize worth having. If you deny it, you’re only showing that you’re unworthy of it.”

 

“No amount of expertly choreographed PR could prevail, in the end, against Armageddon. It strolled over the barricades and took its pleasure.”

 

“This gauntlet, flung down by a bullying, contemptuous universe that allowed human beings to grope their way to sentience just so it could put them in their place that bit more painfully.”

 

“And then like Pandora, opening the great big box of the world and not being afraid, not even caring whether what’s inside is good or bad. Because it’s both. Everything is always both. But you have to open it to find that out.”

 

“It’s not just Pandora who had that inescapable flaw. It seems like everyone has been built in a way that sometimes makes them do wrong and stupid things.”

 

“the horror of the unknown is more frightening than any horror you can understand”

 

“may we live as long as we want, and never want as long as we live,”

 

“And the sun comes out, like a kiss on the cheek from God.”

 

“It’s a little bit like a cow listening to a recipe for beef stew.”

 

“It’s like before the Breakdown people used to spend their whole lives making cocoons for themselves out of furniture and ornaments and books and toys and pictures and any kind of shit they could find. As though they hoped they’d be born out of the cocoon as something else.”

 

“It’s equinox, with the world balanced between winter and summer, life and death, like a spinning ball balanced on the tip of someone’s finger.”

 

“It doesn’t matter,” she explains to Miss J. “I want to be where you are. And I don’t know the way back to wherever I was before, anyway. I don’t even remember it. All I remember is the block, and you. You’re…” Now it’s Melanie’s turn to hesitate. She doesn’t know the words for this. “You’re my bread,” she says at last. “When I’m hungry. I don’t mean that I want to eat you, Miss Justineau! I really don’t! I’d rather die than do that. I just mean… you fill me up the way the bread does to the man in the song. You make me feel like I don’t need anything else.”

 

My Take

It didn’t take long for me to be drawn into the bleak, post-Apocalyptic world created by M.R. Carey in The Girl with All the Gifts.  A big reason was the two main characters, Melanie (a young girl who is incredibly sympathetic despite who constant urge to eat human flesh) and Miss Justineau, Melanie’s teacher and protector who grapples with a world gone mad and her own past demons.  While the subject matter is a big-time downer, I was captivated by the storytelling and held in suspense until the climactic end.  If you like the dystopia genre, you should definitely check out this book.

 

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186. Getting to Yes: Negotiating an Agreement Without Giving In

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Roger Fisher, William Ury, Bruce Patton

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Business, Self-Improvement

200 pages, published December 1, 1991

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Getting to Yes is all about negotiation and how to improve your negotiating skills.  The book is based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, a group that deals with all levels of negotiation and conflict resolution.  Getting to Yes details a step-by-step approach for coming to mutually acceptable agreements in every sort of conflict. The authors describe a method of negotiation that isolates problems, focuses on interests, creates new options, and uses objective criteria to help two parties reach an agreement.

Quotes 

“Any method of negotiation may be fairly judged by three criteria: It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible. It should be efficient. And it should improve or at least not damage the relationship between the parties.”

 

“THE METHOD 2. Separate the People from the Problem 3. Focus on Interests, Not Positions 4. Invent Options for Mutual Gain 5. Insist on Using Objective Criteria.”

“People listen better if they feel that you have understood them. They tend to think that those who understand them are intelligent and sympathetic people whose own opinions may be worth listening to. So if you want the other side to appreciate your interests, begin by demonstrating that you appreciate theirs.”

 

“The ability to see the situation as the other side sees it, as difficult as it may be, is one of the most important skills a negotiator can possess.”

 

“As useful as looking for objective reality can be, it is ultimately the reality as each side sees it that constitutes the problem in a negotiation and opens the way to a solution.”

 

“The more extreme the opening positions and the smaller the concessions, the more time and effort it will take to discover whether or not agreement is possible.”

 

“If you want someone to listen and understand your reasoning, give your interests and reasoning first and your conclusions or proposals later.”

 

“The most powerful interests are basic human needs. In searching for the basic interests behind a declared position, look particularly for those bedrock concerns that motivate all people. If you can take care of such basic needs, you increase the chance both of reaching agreement and, if an agreement is reached, of the other side’s keeping to it. Basic human needs include: security, economic well-being, a sense of belonging, recognition, control over one’s life.  As fundamental as they are, basic human needs are easy to overlook. In many negotiations, we tend to think that the only interest involved is money. Yet even in a negotiation over a monetary figure, such as the amount of alimony to be specified in a separation agreement, much more can be involved.”

 

My Take

Many years ago, when I was practicing law at a big Los Angeles law firm, I joined the other litigation attorneys from my firm for a one day seminar on negotiating at Pepperdine University.  The skills that I learned that day were not only useful in my legal practice, but they were also invaluable in my personal life.  We enter into negotiations all the time, whether it is buying a house or deciding where to have dinner or take a vacation.  Getting to Yes was a very nice complement to the Pepperdine negotiating seminar.  Not only do the authors show you how to negotiate, but they also explain why their proposed style is apt to work.  I learned some new methods for negotiating and also reinforced some of the skills I learned at the seminar.  A very useful book that I can unreservedly recommend.

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183. The Railwayman’s Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ashley Hay

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

288 pages, published April 5, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Set in post World War II 1948 in the small Australian town of Thirroul, The Railwayman’s Wife follows the intersecting lives of three individuals.  Anikka Lachlan is a widow who is left to raise her daughter alone when her husband Mac is killed in a railway accident.  Roy McKinnon is a poet who has lost hope after the war, but finds poetry again when he falls for Anikka.  Frank Draper is a doctor who is weighed down by guilt of those he couldn’t save.

 

Quotes 

“There’s some comfort in seeing things go on; birds keep singing, buses keep running. But if you want those things to continue, perhaps you have to accept that the other kinds of things, unhappier, even horrific ones, will continue too. And that’s harder.”

 

“The oceans and the skies…and the sun coming up each new day. That’s all there is, I think. That’s all that matters to think on.”

 

“That is marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?”

 

“Such fascinating things, libraries.  She closes her eyes.  She could walk inside and step into a murder, a love story, a complete account of somebody else’s life, or mutiny on the high seas. Such potential; such adventure—there’s a shimmer of malfeasance in trying other ways of being.”

 

“How would you start to write a poem? How would you put together a series of words for its first line—how would you know which words to choose? When you read a poem, every word seemed so perfect that it had to have been predestined—well, a good poem.”

 

My Take

The Railwayman’s Wife is a beautifully written, poetic novel about loss, grief, and trying to move on with your life by Australian writer Ashley Hay.  The part of the novel that I enjoyed the most was a lovely and enchanting poem entitled “Lost World” which was specifically written for this book by Australian poet Stephen Edgar.  I’ve tried in vain to find it on-line so that I could post it with this review.  If you want to check it out, you will just have to read this recommended book.

 

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180. Brooklyn

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Colm Tóibín

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, Romance

288 pages, published September 8, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Brooklyn tells the story of Eilis (pronounced eye-liss) Lacey, a young woman who travels from a small town in Ireland to Brooklyn, New York in the years following World War II.  Eilis leaves behind her mother and her beloved sister Rose (her brothers had already left for England after their father died) when she is sponsored by an Irish priest from Brooklyn to live in the United States.  We follow Eilis as she makes her way in a transatlantic crossing on a ocean liner, lives in a boarding house with other young women, gets a job in a department store, takes accounting classes and falls in love with Tony, a sweet boy from a big Italian family.  When Eilis must return to Ireland in response to a family crisis, she is forced to choose between her comfortable life over there and her new, challenging life in America.

 

Quotes 

“What she would need to do in the days before she left and on the morning of her departure was smile, so that they would remember her smiling.”

 

“She thought it was strange that the mere sensation of savouring the prospect of something could make her think for a while that is must be the prospect of home.”

 

“Carefully, she went back up the stairs and found that if she moved along the first landing she would be able to see him from above. Somehow, she thought, if she could look at him, take him in clearly when he was not trying to amuse her or impress her, something would come to her, some knowledge, or some ability to make a decision.”

 

“She felt almost guilty that she had handed some of her grief to him, and then she felt close to him for his willingness to take it and hold it, in all its rawness, all its dark confusion.”

 

“Some people are nice and if you talk to them properly, they can be even nicer.”

 

“We keep our prices low and our manners high.”

 

“What she loved most about America, Eilis thought on these mornings, was how the heating was kept on all night.”

 

“She has gone back to Brooklyn,’ her mother would say. And, as the train rolled past Macmire Bridge on its way towards Wexford, Eilis imagined the years already when these words would come to mean less and less to the man who heard them and would come to mean more and more to herself. She almost smiled at the thought of it, then closed her eyes and tried to imagine nothing more.”

 

My Take

At the beginning of 2016, I saw the movie version of Brooklyn and was enchanted by the simple, sweet tale of a young Irish woman who must choose between a new, challenging life in the United States and her life in Ireland which was comfortable, but with less opportunity and adventure.  After finishing the book, I can report that it is just as good as the movie.  Sometimes, a simple story that is well told can be the satisfying read.  That was the case here and I recommend you check out both the book and movie.

 

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179. The Four Tendencies: The Indispensable Personality Profiles That Reveal How to Make Your Life Better (and Other People’s Lives Better, Too)

Author:   Gretchen Rubin

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Shannon Lemmon

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Psychology

320 pages, published September 12, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In The Four Tendencies, happiness and habit guru Gretchen Rubin explores the four personality tendencies that almost everyone falls into:  Upholders, Questioners, Obligers, and Rebels.  During her years long investigation into understanding human nature, Rubin realized that by asking the simple question “How do I respond to expectations?” we can understand ourselves and our motivations much, much better.  The book includes a 13 question quiz to determine your personality type.  Once we know our personality type, we can order our world to maximize our productivity, achievement, personal relationships and happiness.

Quotes 

“Upholder:  Discipline is my Freedom.”

“Questioner:  I’ll comply if you convince me why.”

“Obliger:  You can count on me, and I’m counting on you counting on me.”

“Rebel:  You can’t make me and neither can I.”

 

“You are the best judge of yourself. If you believe that a different Tendency describes you better, trust yourself.” I took the test and the results told me that I am a Questioner. This result is accurate, but like the good questioner that I am, I question the validity of Gretchen’s test.”

 

My Take

I’m a big fan of Gretchen Rubin, having read all of her previous books (The Happiness Project is my all time favorite, but I also got a lot out of Better than Before, her book on forming positive habits) and am also a frequent listener of her Happier podcast.  The Four Tendencies goes deeper into the subject of how we respond to expectations first raised by Rubin in Better than Before.  While whipping through this book in a single day, I took the test included in the book and was not surprised to find that I am an Upholder (someone who is characterized by self-discipline and is accountable to both internal and external expectations).  I had my husband Scot take the test and was surprised to learn that he is a Rebel (“don’t tell me what to do”).  Upholder-Rebel combinations in a marriage are rare, but ours works best when I just let Scot do what he wants to do.  With lots of practical advice on how to manage not only your own tendency, but those of those who are close to you, The Four Tendencies is a fascinating and useful read.

 

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176. Rules of Civility

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Amor Towles

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction

335 pages, published July 26, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

On the last night of 1937, boarding house roommates and friends Katey Kontent and Eve Ross are at a Greenwich Village jazz bar when they meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with blue eyes and a winning smile. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from her work as a law firm secretary to  pool to the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast. Katey experiences a world of wealth firsthand and discovers that there is often more to things and people than first meets the eye.

 

Quotes 

“In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.”

 

“Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.”

 

“Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane–in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath–she had probably put herself in unnecessary danger.”

 

“As a quick aside, let me observe that in moments of high emotion….if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say. This is one of the finer maxims that I’ve discovered in life. And you can have it, since it’s been of no use to me.”

 

“Most people have more needs than wants. That’s why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.”

 

“The principle here is that a new generation owes a measure of thanks to every member of the previous generation. Our elders planted fields and fought in wars; they advanced the arts and sciences, and generally made sacrifices on our behalf. So by their efforts, however humble, they have earned a measure of our gratitude and respect.”

 

“For better or worse, there are few things so disarming as one who laughs well at her own expense.”

 

“Slurring is the cursive of speech…”

 

“Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.”                                     

 

“Right from the first, I could see a calmness in you – that sort of inner tranquility that they write about in books, but that almost no one seems to possess. I was wondering to myself: How does she do that? And I figured it could only come from having no regrets – from having made choices with …. such poise and purpose.”

 

“—I probably shouldn’t tell you this, I said.

—Kay-Kay, those are my six favorite words in the English language.”

 

“After all, what can a first impression tell us about someone we’ve just met for a minute in the lobby of a hotel? For that matter, what can a first impression tell us about anyone? Why, no more than a chord can tell us about Beethoven, or a brushstroke about Botticelli. By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour.”

 

“For as it turns out, one can revisit the past quite pleasantly, as long as one does so expecting nearly every aspect of it to have changed.”

 

“Anyone who has ridden the subway twice a day to earn their bread knows how it goes: When you board, you exhibit the same persona you use with your colleagues and acquaintances. You’ve carried it through the turnstile and past the sliding doors, so that your fellow passengers can tell who you are – cocky or cautious, amorous or indifferent, loaded or on the dole. But you find yourself a seat and the train gets under way; it comes to one station and then another; people get off and others get on. And under the influence of the cradlelike rocking of the train, your carefully crafted persona begins to slip away. The super-ego dissolves as your mind begins to wander aimlessly over your cares and your dreams; or better yet, it drifts into ambient hypnosis, where even cares and dreams recede and the peaceful silence of the cosmos pervades.”

 

“Really. Is there anything nice to be said about other people’s vacations?”

 

“For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise – that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving.”

 

“If we only fell in love with people who were perfect for us…then there wouldn’t be so much fuss about love in the first place.”

 

“…be careful when choosing what you’re proud of–because the world has every intention of using it against you.”

 

“That’s the problem with living in New York. You’ve got no New York to run away to.”

 

My Take

Published in 2011, Rules of Civility won The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) Fiction Book of the Year award.   After reading it, I can understand why.  While the plot meanders all over the place, you cannot help but be impressed by the quality of Amor Towles’ writing.  Just look at the quotes I pulled out.  The man knows how to write.  I didn’t like Rules of Civility as much as his recent A Gentlemen in Moscow (which garnered a rare five stars from me), but I still really enjoyed it and can wholeheartedly recommend it.

 

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175. Polio: An American Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans and Darla Schueth

Author:   David M. Oshinsky

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Science, Medicine, Public Policy

342 pages, published September 1, 2006

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In Polio:  An American Story, Historian David Oshinsky tells the gripping story of a world terrorized by polio and the intense effort to find a cure, from the March of Dimes to the discovery of the Salk and Sabin vaccines.  Drawing on newly available papers of Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin and other key players, Oshinsky paints a suspenseful portrait of the race for the cure, weaving a dramatic tale centered on the furious rivalry between Salk and Sabin. We also get an inside look at the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis which was founded in the 1930s by FDR and Basil O’Connor and which revolutionized fundraising and the perception of disease in America.

 

 

My Take

For the past five years, I have been a member of the Boulder Rotary Club.  From my first meeting, I became aware that eradicating polio from the face of the earth has been a long time mission of all Rotarians throughout the world and indeed, Rotarians have contributed mightily to making that happen.  Our Rotary Club just launched a book group for our club (how could I not join) and given Rotary’s history, it was no surprise that our first selection was Polio:  An American Story.  What was surprising was how much I enjoyed this book.  A well-deserved Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History (2006) and the Herbert Hoover Book Award (2005),   Oshinsky takes a potentially dry subject and breaths fascinating life into it.  Through the lens of polio, we see how the scientific, cultural, sociological and historical shifts in our nation as we progressed through the twentieth century.  Both a gripping scientific suspense story and a provocative social and cultural history, Polio:  An American Story provides fresh insight into post World War II era America.

 

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