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75. Bossypants

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Tina Fey

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

283 pages, published April 5, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Before she was Liz Lemon on 30 Rock, before she anchored Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live and before she nailed an impersonation of Sarah Palin to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher.  She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.  As Fey recounts in Bossypants she has seen both of these dreams come true.  She also gives a very funny recounting of her childhood, college years, struggling to make it in Chicago, writing and acting on Saturday Night Live, creating 30 Rock, being a star, marriage and motherhood.

 

Quotes

“So, my unsolicited advice to women in the workplace is this. When faced with sexism, or ageism, or lookism, or even really aggressive Buddhism, ask yourself the following question: “Is this person in between me and what I want to do?” If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing your work and outpacing people that way. Then, when you’re in charge, don’t hire the people who were jerky to you.”

 

“Read! When your baby is finally down for the night, pick up a juicy book like Eat, Pray, Love or Pride and Prejudice or my personal favorite, Understanding Sleep Disorders: Narcolepsy and Apnea; A Clinical Study. Taking some time to read each night really taught me how to feign narcolepsy when my husband asked me what my “plan” was for taking down the Christmas tree.”

 

“Lesson learned? When people say, “You really, really must” do something, it means you don’t really have to. No one ever says, “You really, really must deliver the baby during labor.” When it’s true, it doesn’t need to be said.”

 

“MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice.”

 

“You can’t be that kid standing at the top of the waterslide, overthinking it. You have to go down the chute.”

 

“Confidence is 10% hard work and 90% delusion.”

 

“This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct.”

 

“Instead of trying to fit an impossible ideal, I took a personal inventory of all my healthy body parts for which I am grateful: Straight Greek eyebrows. They start at the hairline at my temple and, left unchecked, will grow straight across my face and onto yours.”

 

“Once or twice a week I would set my alarm for six A.M. so I could get up and plug in Hot Stix…I would study the curls in the mirror, impressed with both the appliance and my newfound ability to use it.   Then, without fail, at the last second before leaving for school, I would ask myself, “Am I supposed to brush it out or leave it?” Why could I never remember” That feeling of “I’m pretty sure this next step is wrong, but I’m just gonna do it anyway” is part of the same set of instincts that makes me such a great cook.”

 

“It can’t be said enough. Don’t concern yourself with fashion; stick to simple pieces that flatter your body type. By nineteen, I had found my look. Oversize T-shirts, bike shorts, and wrestling shoes. To prevent the silhouette from being too baggy, I would cinch it at the waist with my fanny pack. I was pretty sure I would wear this look forever. The shirts allowed me to express myself with cool sayings like “There’s No Crying in Baseball” and “Universität Heidelberg,” the bike shorts showed off my muscular legs, and the fanny pack held all my trolley tokens. I was nailing it on a daily basis. Find something like this for yourself as soon as possible.”

 

“Brendan suddenly ‘came out’ to me. In my experience, the hardest thing about having someone ‘come out’ to you is the ‘pretending to be surprised’ part. You want him to feel like what he’s telling you is Big. It’s like, if somebody tells you they’re pregnant, you don’t say, ‘I did notice you’ve been eating like a hog lately.’ Your gay friend has obviously made a big decision to say the words out loud. You don’t want him to realize that everybody’s known this since he was ten and he wanted to be Bert Lahr for Halloween. Not the Cowardly Lion, but Bert Lahr. ‘Oh, my gosh, no waaaay?’ You stall, trying to think of something more substantial to say. ‘Is everyone, like, freaking out? What a… wow.”

 

“What Turning Forty Means to Me.  I need to take my pants off as soon as I get home. I didn’t used to have to do that. But now I do.”

 

“This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. “You’re up for a promotion. If they go for a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.” Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”

 

“Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers.”

 

“If you retain nothing else, always remember the most important rule of beauty, which is: who cares?”

 

“My ability to turn good news into anxiety is rivaled only by my ability to turn anxiety into chin acne.”

 

“I only hope that one day I can frighten my daughter this much. Right now, she’s not scared of my husband or me at all. I think it’s a problem. I was a freshman home from college the first time my dad said, “You’re going out at ten p.m.? I don’t think so,” and I just laughed and said, “It’s fine.” I feel like my daughter will be doing that to me by age six.  How can I give her what Don Fey gave me? The gift of anxiety. The fear of getting in trouble. The knowledge that while you are loved, you are not above the law. The Worldwide Parental Anxiety System is failing if this many of us have made sex tapes.”

“First, Lord: No tattoos. May neither Chinese symbol for truth nor Winnie-the-Pooh holding the FSU logo stain her tender haunches.

May she be Beautiful but not Damaged, for it’s the Damage that draws the creepy soccer coach’s eye, not the Beauty.

When the Crystal Meth is offered, May she remember the parents who cut her grapes in half And stick with Beer.

Guide her, protect her

When crossing the street, stepping onto boats, swimming in the ocean, swimming in pools, walking near pools, standing on the subway platform, crossing 86th Street, stepping off of boats, using mall restrooms, getting on and off escalators, driving on country roads while arguing, leaning on large windows, walking in parking lots, riding Ferris wheels, roller-coasters, log flumes, or anything called “Hell Drop,” “Tower of Torture,” or “The Death Spiral Rock ‘N Zero G Roll featuring Aerosmith,” and standing on any kind of balcony ever, anywhere, at any age.

Lead her away from Acting but not all the way to Finance. Something where she can make her own hours but still feel intellectually fulfilled and get outside sometimes And not have to wear high heels.

What would that be, Lord? Architecture? Midwifery? Golf course design? I’m asking You, because if I knew, I’d be doing it, Youdammit.

May she play the Drums to the fiery rhythm of her Own Heart with the sinewy strength of her Own Arms, so she need Not Lie With Drummers.

Grant her a Rough Patch from twelve to seventeen. Let her draw horses and be interested in Barbies for much too long, For childhood is short – a Tiger Flower blooming Magenta for one day – And adulthood is long and dry-humping in cars will wait.

O Lord, break the Internet forever, That she may be spared the misspelled invective of her peers And the online marketing campaign for Rape Hostel V: Girls Just Wanna Get Stabbed.

And when she one day turns on me and calls me a Bitch in front of Hollister, Give me the strength, Lord, to yank her directly into a cab in front of her friends, For I will not have that Shit. I will not have it.

And should she choose to be a Mother one day, be my eyes, Lord, that I may see her, lying on a blanket on the floor at 4:50 A.M., all-at-once exhausted, bored, and in love with the little creature whose poop is leaking up its back.

“My mother did this for me once,” she will realize as she cleans feces off her baby’s neck. “My mother did this for me.” And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me. And she will forget. But I’ll know, because I peeped it with Your God eyes.”

 

“But I think the first real change in women’s body image came when JLo turned it butt-style. That was the first time that having a large-scale situation in the back was part of mainstream American beauty. Girls wanted butts now. Men were free to admit that they had always enjoyed them. And then, what felt like moments later, boom—Beyoncé brought the leg meat. A back porch and thick muscular legs were now widely admired. And from that day forward, women embraced their diversity and realized that all shapes and sizes are beautiful. Ah ha ha. No. I’m totally messing with you. All Beyonce and JLo have done is add to the laundry list of attributes women must have to qualify as beautiful. Now every girl is expected to have Caucasian blue eyes, full Spanish lips, a classic button nose, hairless Asian skin with a California tan, a Jamaican dance hall ass, long Swedish legs, small Japanese feet, the abs of a lesbian gym owner, the hips of a nine-year-old boy, the arms of Michelle Obama, and doll tits. The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes.”

My Take

Not only was Bossypants hilarious, but it also offered a lot of practical career and life advice for women in the vein of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In.  Fey is also very sweet and tender when telling stories about her father Don Fey.  If you were ever the person who didn’t fit in despite a big effort, then you will relate to this book, especially Fey’s retelling of her time in high school and college.  At the end, you will also be more grateful for your lack of fitting in as it usually makes for a more interesting life.  That is certainly the case with Tina Fey.

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74. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Christopher Funk

Author:   Peter Diamandis

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Economics

400 pages, published February 21, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

In Abundance, tech entrepreneur turned philanthropist Peter Diamandis makes the case that the world is a lot better off than you think it is and that we are getting close to the time we will be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every human being on earth.  Diamandis backs up this bold claim with extensive research and shows how four forces (exponential technologies, the DIY innovator, the Technophilanthropist, and the Rising Billion) are all helping to solve humanity’s biggest problems.  Abundance profiles many innovators doing amazing work including Larry Page, Steven Hawking, Dean Kamen, Daniel Kahneman, Elon Musk, Bill Joy, Stewart Brand, Jeff Skoll, Ray Kurzweil, Ratan Tata, and Craig Venter.   After discussing human needs by category—water, food, energy, healthcare, education, and freedom, Diamandis sets forth concrete targets for change and lays out a strategic roadmap for governments, industry and entrepreneurs to achieve these goals.

 

Quotes

“Quite simply, good news doesn’t catch our attention. Bad news sells because the amygdala is always looking for something to fear.”

 

“It’s incredible,” he says, “this moaning pessimism, this knee-jerk, things-are-going-downhill reaction from people living amid luxury and security that their ancestors would have died for. The tendency to see the emptiness of every glass is pervasive. It’s almost as if people cling to bad news like a comfort blanket.”

 

“Today Americans living below the poverty line are not just light-years ahead of most Africans; they’re light-years ahead of the wealthiest Americans from just a century ago. Today 99 percent of Americans living below the poverty line have electricity, water, flushing toilets, and a refrigerator; 95 percent have a television; 88 percent have a telephone; 71 percent have a car; and 70 percent even have air-conditioning. This may not seem like much, but one hundred years ago men like Henry Ford and Cornelius Vanderbilt were among the richest on the planet, but they enjoyed few of these luxuries.”

 

“I’ve got a hunk of gold and you have a watch. If we trade, then I have a watch and you have a hunk of gold. But if you have an idea and I have an idea, and we exchange them, then we both have two ideas. It’s nonzero.”

 

“Poverty was reduced more in the past fifty years than in the previous five hundred.”

“Teaching kids how to nourish their creativity and curiosity, while still providing a sound foundation in critical thinking, literacy and math, is the best way to prepare them for a future of increasingly rapid technological change.”

 

“The true measure of something’s worth is the hours it takes to acquire it.”

 

“Technology is a resource-liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”

 

“if everyone on Earth wants to live like a North American, then we’re going to need five planets’ worth of resources.”

 

“The negativity bias—the tendency to give more weight to negative information and experiences than positive ones—sure isn’t helping matters. Then there’s anchoring: the predilection for relying too heavily on one piece of information when making decisions. “When people believe the world’s falling apart,” says Kahneman, “it’s often an anchoring problem. At the end of the nineteenth century, London was becoming uninhabitable because of the accumulation of horse manure. People were absolutely panicked. Because of anchoring, they couldn’t imagine any other possible solutions. No one had any idea the car was coming and soon they’d be worrying about dirty skies, not dirty streets.”

 

“Today most poverty-stricken Americans have a television, telephone, electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing. Most Africans do not. If you transferred the goods and services enjoyed by those who live in California’s version of poverty to the average Somalian living on less than a $1.25 a day, that Somalian is suddenly fabulously rich.”

 

“Decentralized means learning cannot easily be curtailed by autocratic governments and is considerably more immune to socioeconomic upheaval.”

 

“A week’s worth of the New York Times contains more information than the average seventeenth-century citizen encountered in a lifetime.”

 

“If we were to forgo our television addiction for just one year, the world would have over a trillion hours of cognitive surplus to commit to share projects.”

 

“From the very beginning of time until the year 2003,” says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, “humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes—or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It’s no wonder we’re exhausted.”

 

“Abundance is not about providing everyone on this planet with a life of luxury—rather it’s about providing all with a life of possibility.”

 

“Nanotechnology has the potential to enhance human performance, to bring sustainable development for materials, water, energy, and food, to protect against unknown bacteria and viruses, and even to diminish the reasons for breaking the peace [by creating universal abundance].”

 

“Today mammography requires an expensive, large, stationary machine that takes a crude, two-dimensional picture. But imagine a ‘bra’ that has tiny X-ray pixel emitters on the top and X-ray sensors on the bottom. It’s self-contained, self-powered, has a 3G or Wi-Fi-enabled network, and can be shipped to a patient in a FedEx box. The patient puts on the bra, pushes a button, and the doctor comes online and starts talking: ‘Hi. All set to take your mammogram? Hold still.’ The X-ray pixels fire, the detectors assemble and transmit the image, and the doctor reads it on the spot. The patient ships back the package, and she’s done. With little time and little money.”

 

My Take

Abundance is my kind of book.  I have always been a “glass half full” person and it is encouraging to read an optimistic take on the future of the world.  So many people think that we live in terrible times and that things are getting worse.  Peter Diamandis repeatedly demonstrates that folly of that mindset and that things have never been better.  Not only is the world-wide poverty rate declining dramatically and rapidly, but there are a plethora of technological innovations coming our way that will make life better and more meaningful.  Abundance made me realize how good we have it now and excited for all of the future developments that are coming our way soon.

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71. Big Little Lies

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Liane Moriarity

Genre:  Fiction

460 pages, published July 29, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book and Book

Summary 

Big Little Lies tells the story of three friends in a seaside Australian town of Pirriwee.  Madeline, a divorced and remarried mother of three, is funny, passionate, remembers everything and forgives no one.  Her ex-husband and his new zen wife Bonnie have moved into her beloved beachside community and Madeline’s daughter seems to be to be choosing Madeline’s ex-husband over her.  Celeste is a woman of striking beauty married to Perry, a incredibly handsome and rich man who seems to the outside world to be the perfect husband and father.  However, things are not always as they appear to be.  Jane is a very young single mother who, with her son Ziggy, are recent arrivals in Pirriwee and are befriended by Madeline and Celeste.   Jane harbors a sad secret and has concerns about her son’s character when he is accused of accosting a girl in his Kindergarten class.  The stories of these three women develop and intersect in interesting ways that culminate in a potential murder at the Pirriwee Public School’s trivia night.

 

Quotes

“They say it’s good to let your grudges go, but I don’t know, I’m quite fond of my grudge. I tend it like a little pet.”

 

“Everyone wanted to be rich and beautiful, but the truly rich and beautiful had to pretend they were just the same as everyone else.”

 

“If she packaged the perfect Facebook life, maybe she would start to believe it herself.”

 

“I mean a fat, ugly man can still be funny and lovable and successful,” continued Jane. “But it’s like it’s the most shameful thing for a woman to be.” “But you weren’t, you’re not—” began Madeline. “Yes, OK, but so what if I was!” interrupted Jane. “What if I was! That’s my point. What if I was a bit overweight and not especially pretty? Why is that so terrible? So disgusting? Why is that the end of the world?”

 

“Every day I think, ‘Gosh, you look a bit tired today,’ and it’s just recently occurred to me that it’s not that I’m tired, it’s that this is the way I look now.”

 

“The only woman who deserved a philandering husband was a philandering wife.”

 

“Nothing and nobody could aggravate you the way your child could aggravate you.”

 

“Stick with the nice boys, Chloe!” said Madeline after a moment. “Like Daddy. Bad boys don’t bring you coffee in bed, I’ll tell you that for free.”

 

“every relationship had its own “love account.” Doing something kind for your partner was like a deposit. A negative comment was a withdrawal. The trick was to keep your account in credit.”

 

“This was not the career she’d dreamed of as an ambitious seventeen-year-old, but now it was hard to remember ever feeling innocent and audacious enough to dream of a certain type of life, as if you got to choose how things turned out.”

 

“It was just so very surprising that the good-looking, worried man who had just offered her a cup of tea, and was right now working at his computer down the hallway, and who would come running if she called him, and who loved her with all of his strange heart, would in all probability one day kill her.”

My Take

I have read Liane Moriarty’s (author of The Husband’s Secret, What Alice Forgot, and Truly, Madly, GreatlyBig Little Lies twice, the audio version last year and the book version this year when I assigned it to my book club.  As Gretchen Rubin opines in The Happiness Project (which is one of my all time favorite books):  “the best reading is re-reading.”  I’m not sure that  I gained a lot more the second time around, but I did enjoy it both times (although the narrator’s voice with her heavy Australian accent on the audio version took some getting used to).  The women protagonists of Big Little Lies draw you into their lives and it is not hard to empathize with their pain, struggles and heartbreak.  I was especially moved by Celeste, the rich and beautiful woman who seemed to have it all, but who realistically thought she might not live another year.  Big Little Lies is worth a read and I recommend it.

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70. Stories I Tell My Friends

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Rob Lowe

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir, Movies

320 pages, published April 26, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

Stories I Tell My Friends is Rob Lowe’s memoir in which he tells stories about his fascinating life.  Lowe recounts the pain of his parents’ divorce as a child from the Midwest and tells how his life shifted when his mother moved to a counterculture Malibu of the mid-seventies where his neighbors and friends were Charlie Sheen, Emilio Estevez, and Sean Penn.  After he was cast in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Outsiders, Lowe soon became a teen idol and a member of the Brat Pack.  Lowe went on to a movie career with lots of ups and downs, moving to television when was cast as speechwriter Sam Seaborn in the iconic series The West Wing.

Quotes

“So I came to the realization: Nothing in life is unfair. It’s just life.”

 

“Fake confidence on the outside often trumps truthful turmoil on the inside.”

 

“The best part is not the biggest, it’s the one that’s most memorable.”

 

“They don’t really listen to speeches or talks. They absorb incrementally, through hours and hours of observation. The sad truth about divorce is that it’s hard to teach your kids about life unless you are living life with them: eating together, doing homework, watching Little League, driving them around endlessly, being bored with nothing to do, letting them listen while you do business, while you negotiate love and the frustrations and complications and rewards of living day in and out with your wife. Through this, they see how adults handle responsibility, honesty, commitment, jealousy, anger, professional pressures, and social interactions. Kids learn from whoever is around them the most.”

 

“I’m thinking of how unexpected and yet oddly preordained life can be. Events are upon you in an instant, unforseen and without warning, and often times marked with disappointment and tragedy, but equally often leading to a better understanding of the bittersweet truth of life.”

 

“To be counter to the culture, you are by definition willfully and actively ignoring the culture, i.e., reality. And when you ignore reality for too long, you begin to feel immune to, or above, the gravitational pull that binds everyone else. You are courting disaster.”

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69. Do More, Spend Less

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Brad Wilson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Personal Finance

208 pages, published January 14, 2013

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

Do More, Spend Less by Brad Wilson, the founder of the moneysaving website Brad’s Deals, tells Wilson’s personal story of how he became a deal machine, including amassing  five million frequent-flyer miles and taking five star vacations for little cost, and also gives lots of practical tips on on how to get the lowest price on just about anything.

Quotes

“I paused to appreciate the moment. We were flying in international first class to a five-star hotel, enjoying a no-expense-spared two-and-a-half week European vacation with the finest services and amenities. The trip, had we paid cash, would have cost more than $50,000. Our cost? Zero.  What a life! I just knew I had to tell everyone else how they could live this way.”

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68. Mr. Mercedes

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:  Fiction, Crime, Thriller, Suspense

436 pages, published June 3, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

Mr. Mercedes, the first book in the Bill Hodges Trilogy by Stephen King, tells the story of a psychopathic serial killer nicknamed Mr. Mercedes after he intentionally plows through a crowd of people waiting for an unemployment fair to begin in a stolen Mercedes.  He escapes after killing eight people and wounding fifteen more.  Months later, retired cop Bill Hodges, who is still haunted by this unsolved crime, receives a crazed letter from someone who self-identifies as the “perk” and threatens more attacks.  Hodges takes the bait and starts conversing with Mr. Mercedes.  It soon becomes apparent that only Bill Hodges, with a couple of highly unlikely allies, can apprehend the killer before he strikes again in a bigger way.

Quotes

“Never tell a lie when you can tell the truth.”

 

“Every religion lies. Every moral precept is a delusion. Even the stars are a mirage. The truth is darkness, and the only thing that matters is making a statement before one enters it. Cutting the skin of the world and leaving a scar. That’s all history is, after all: scar tissue.”

 

“Hodges has read there are wells in Iceland so deep you can drop a stone down them and never hear the splash. He thinks some human souls are like that.”

 

“It’s easy—too easy—to either disbelieve or disregard someone you dislike.”

 

“Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master.”

 

“You know the three Ages of Man, don’t you?” Hodges asks. Pete shakes his head, grinning. “Youth, middle age, and you look fuckin terrific.”

 

“Any system created by the mind of man can be hacked by the mind of man.”

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67. The Social Animal

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Brooks

Genre:  Non Fiction, Sociology

424 pages, published March 8, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

The Social Animal is the story of how people succeed in our society.  It is told through the lives of Harold and Erica, a composite American couple, and follows how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed.  Brooks infuses their lives with a vast amount of social science research to illustrate an understanding of human nature.  In the last thirty years, we have learned more about the human brain than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind which contains our emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms is creative center where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made.

Quotes

“It is an emotional and an enchanted place. If the study of the conscious mind highlights the importance of reason and analysis, study of the unconscious mind highlights the importance of passions and perception.”

 

“In his book Human Universals, Donald E. Brown lists traits that people in all places share. The list goes on and on. All children fear strangers and prefer sugar solutions to plain water from birth. All humans enjoy stories, myths, and proverbs. In all societies men engage in more group violence and travel farther from home than women. In all societies, husbands are on average older than their wives. People everywhere rank one another according to prestige. People everywhere divide the world between those inside their group and those outside their group. These tendencies are all stored deep below awareness.”

 

“Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses.  On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own.  We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad about talking about emotions and intuitions.  We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say.”

 

“Most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years.  And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations.  The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing.”

 

“Plato believed the soul was divided into three parts: reason, spirit, and appetite. Reason seeks truth and wants the best for the whole person. Spirit seeks recognition and glory. Appetite seeks base pleasures.”

 

“Reason and emotion are not separate and opposed.  Reason is nestled upon emotion and dependent upon it.  Emotion assigns value to things, and reason can only make choices on the basis of those valuations. The human mind can be pragmatic because deep down it is romantic.”

 

“There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there”

 

“People who succeed tend to find one goal in the distant future and then chase it through thick and thin.  People who flit from one interest to another are much, much less likely to excel at any of them.  School asks students to be good at a range of subjects, but life asks people to find one passion that they will follow forever.”

 

“If there is one thing developmental psychologists have learned over the years, it is that parents don’t have to be brilliant psychologists to succeed. They don’t have to be supremely gifted teachers. Most of the stuff parents do with flashcards and special drills and tutorials to hone their kids into perfect achievement machines don’t have any effect at all. Instead, parents just have to be good enough. They have to provide their kids with stable and predictable rhythms. They need to be able to fall in tune with their kids’ needs, combining warmth and discipline. They need to establish the secure emotional bonds that kids can fall back upon in the face of stress. They need to be there to provide living examples of how to cope with the problems of the world so that their children can develop unconscious models in their heads.”

 

“Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.”

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66. About Alice

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Calvin Trillin

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Memoir

96 pages, published December 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

In this very short memoir about his late wife, Calvin Trillin paints a moving portrait of Alice.  She was the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Trillin tells stories of Alice as an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”  Trillin deeply loved his wife and never quit trying to impress her.  The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice.  Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

Quotes

“Your children are either the center of your life or they’re not, and the rest is commentary.”

 

“School plays were invented partly to give parents and easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities.”

 

“Among married couples the person who actually makes out the mortgage check is likely to be more cautious about spending money than the person who doesn’t. There is something sobering about sending away that much money every month in the knowledge that, rain or shine, you’ll have to come up with the same amount of money the next month and the month after that.”

 

“For Alice, of course, the measure of how you held up in the face of a life-threatening illness was not how much you changed but how much you stayed the same, in control of your own identity.”

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65. Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Atul Gawande

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Medicine, Health, Public Policy

282 pages, published October 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

In Being Mortal, Gawande, a practicing surgeon, tackles the difficult issue of how medicine can not only improve life but also death.  While modern medicine has made amazing advances in the past few decades, it is still challenged when dealing with end of life issues where the interests of human spirit and dignity are often inadequately considered.  Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Doctors, committed to extending life, often impose devastating procedures that may extend the quantity of life, but also severely impact the quality.  Gawande argues that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families and offers examples of better models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly.  He also explores hospice and shows that a person’s last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

Quotes

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people’s minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence.  A seemingly happy life may be empty.  A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.  We have purposes larger than ourselves. Unlike your experiencing self—which is absorbed in the moment—your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Why would a football fan let a few flubbed minutes at the end of the game ruin three hours of bliss?  Because a football game is a story.  And in stories, endings matter.”

“Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knows how to fight for territory that can be won and how to surrender it when it can’t, someone who understands that the damage is greatest if all you do is battle to the bitter end.”

 

“Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.”

 

“It is not death that the very old tell me they fear. It is what happens short of death—losing their hearing, their memory, their best friends, their way of life. As Felix put it to me, “Old age is a continuous series of losses.” Philip Roth put it more bitterly in his novel Everyman: “Old age is not a battle. Old age is a massacre.”

 

“Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. It gave people—the young and the old—a way of life with more liberty and control, including the liberty to be less beholden to other generations. The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self.”

 

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”

 

“The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater: a family, a community, a society. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror. But if you do, it is not. Loyalty, said Royce, “solves the paradox of our ordinary existence by showing us outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.” In more recent times, psychologists have used the term “transcendence” for a version of this idea. Above the level of self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, they suggest the existence in people of a transcendent desire to see and help other beings achieve their potential.”

 

“You may not control life’s circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.”

 

“We’re always trotting out some story of a ninety-seven-year-old who runs marathons, as if such cases were not miracles of biological luck but reasonable expectations for all. Then, when our bodies fail to live up to this fantasy, we feel as if we somehow have something to apologize for.”

 

“A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.”

 

“The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”

 

“Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person’s life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.”

 

“People with serious illness have priorities besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys find that their top concerns include avoiding suffering, strengthening relationships with family and friends, being mentally aware, not being a burden on others, and achieving a sense that their life is complete.”

 

“Your chances of avoiding the nursing home are directly related to the number of children you have.”

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63. Peace Like a River

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Kay Lynn Hartmann

Author:   Leif Enger

Genre:  Fiction

312 pages, published August 14, 2002

Reading Format:  Audio Book


Summary 

Peace Like a River takes its title from the lyrics of the hymn “It Is Well with My Soul.”  Set in 1962, the book is narrated by Reuben Land, an asthmatic eleven-year-old, and tells the story of his older brother Davy and younger sister Swede. His father, Jeremiah is a school janitor and a deeply spiritual Protestant who occasionally performs miracles which are only witnessed by Reuben.  When two delinquents are prevented by Jeremiah from molesting Davy’s girlfriend, they attempt revenge by kidnapping Swede but return her unharmed. Davy kills them after provoking them to enter his home, leading him to be tried for manslaughter.  At the trial, Reuben is the only eyewitness to the killing and though determined not to betray his brother, he gives a compromising testimony that ensures the probability of a conviction.  Before the conclusion of the trial, Davy escapes.

Quotes

“Fair is whatever God wants to do.”

 

“Sometimes heroism is nothing more than patience, curiosity, and a refusal to panic.”

 

“Real miracles bother people, like strange sudden pains unknown in medical literature. It’s true: They rebut every rule all we good citizens take comfort in. Lazarus obeying orders and climbing up out of the grave – now there’s a miracle, and you can bet it upset a lot of folks who were standing around at the time.  When a person dies, the earth is generally unwilling to cough him back up. A miracle contradicts the will of the earth.”

 

“Let me say something about that word:  miracle.  For too long it’s been used to characterize things or events that, though pleasant, are entirely normal.  Peeping chicks at Easter time, spring generally, a clear sunrise after an overcast week–a miracle, people say, as if they’ve been educated from greeting cards.”

 

“Be careful whom you choose to hate.  The small and the vulnerable own a protection great enough, if you could but see it, to melt you into jelly.  Beware those who reside beneath the shadow of the Wings.”

 

“It is one thing to say you’re at war with this whole world and stick your chest out believing it, but when the world shows up with it’s crushing numbers and its predatory knowledge, it is another thing completely.”

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