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579.    The Island of Sea Women

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nancy Sissom

Author:   Lisa See

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Foreign, World War II

374 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Set on the Korean island of Jeju, The Island of Sea Women tells the story of Mi-ja and Young-sook, two young girls who work together as sea divers in their village’s all-female diving collective. The book covers the ups and downs of their relationship through the period of Japanese colonialism in the 1930s and 1940s, World War II, the Korean War, until the modern era.

Quotes 

“They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“How do we fall in love? … How different it is with friendship. No one picks a friend for us. We come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son. We tie ourselves together through moment. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else ever will.”

 

“To understand everything is to forgive.”

 

“Fall down eight times, stand up nine. For me, this saying is less about the dead paving the way for future generations than it is for the women of Jeju. We suffer and suffer and suffer, but we also keep getting up. We keep living. You would not be here if you weren’t brave. Now you need to be braver still.”

 

“The sea is better than a mother. You can love your mother, and she still might leave you. You can love or hate the sea, but it will always be there. Forever. The sea has been the center of her life. It has nurtured her and stolen from her, but it has never left.”

 

“You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“Her house is the nest where she hides the joy, laughter, sorrows, and regrets of her life.”

 

“Parents exist in children,” Grandmother said to bolster my confidence. “Your mother will always exist in you. She will give you strength wherever you go.”

 

“I’ve had to think about the dark shadow side of friendship. This is the person who knows and loves you best, which means she knows all the ways to hurt and betray you.”

 

“Who can name a death that was not tragic?” the speaker asks. “Is there a way for us to find meaning in the losses we’ve suffered? Who can say that one soul has a heavier grievance than another? We were all victims. We need to forgive each other.”

 

Remember? Yes. Forgive? No.”

 

“How can I help change things if I sit by and do nothing?”

 

“For a tree that has many branches, even a small breeze will shake some loose.”

 

“They did this to me. They did that to me. A woman who thinks that way will never overcome her anger. You are not being punished for your anger. You’re being punished by your anger.”

 

“And it confused me to think that the cloven-footed ones could have so many marvelous creations.”

 

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back,” she warned the gathering. “In this world, in the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life. We are crossing between life and death every day.”

 

“As the eldest daughter, I had always been responsible for my younger siblings. Now I had to provide their food and clothing and be a second mother to them. My father was no help. He was a kind man, but he shuddered under the added responsibility. Too often I found him outside, alone with his sadness. No man was built to shoulder the full weight of feeding and caring for his family. That was why he had a wife and daughters.”

 

“You have been a good mother to your children, but now you must be an even better and stronger mother. Children are hope and joy. On land, you will be a mother. In the sea, you can be a grieving widow. Your tears will be added to the oceans of salty tears that wash in great waves across our planet. This I know. If you try to live, you can live on well.”

 

“Women live quietly,” I said. “However angry or broken a woman might get, she does not think about beating someone, does she?”

 

“If there is happiness at age three, it will last until you reach eighty.”

 

“I was a haenyeo—independent and resilient—but I’d missed my husband.”

 

“Confucius didn’t care much for women: When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son.”

 

“The saying You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain suggests a gradual change and can be interpreted in two ways, one positive, the other negative. A positive story might involve friendship, which grows over time. First you are acquaintances, then friends, then a closer relationship develops, until you realize that you love each other. A darker example might be about a criminal. A person steals a small thing, then a larger thing, until finally he’s become a thief. The point is, you’re not aware just how wet you’re getting when the drizzle starts.”

 

“No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice. We are not tied together through ceremony or the responsibility to create a son; we tie ourselves together through moments. The spark when we first meet. Laughter and tears shared. Secrets packed away to be treasured, hoarded, and protected. The wonder that someone can be so different from you and yet still understand your heart in a way no one else will.”

 

 “When the string breaks while working, there is still the rope. When the oars wear out, there is still the tree, ” she recited. “You feel you can’t go on, but you will.”

 

“You aren’t aware your clothes are getting wet in the rain.”

 

“No one picks a friend for us; we come together by choice.”

 

“A monument will never change how she feels. It’s unfair that victims should have to forgive those who raped, tortured, and killed, or burned villages to the ground. On an Island of World Peace, shouldn’t those who inflicted terrible harm on others be forced to confess and atone, and not make widows and mothers pay for stone monuments?”

 

My Take

I found The Island of Sea Women to be a fascinating piece of historical fiction.  I learned a lot about the Korean people, especially their suffering under the brutal Japanese occupation during the World War II era.  Author Lisa See brings this time period to life with a compelling tale of two best friends who belonged to an elite group of female divers who were torn apart by events and misunderstandings.  Well worth a read.

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576.    Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Business, Sociology, Economics, Psychology

454 pages, published May 18, 2021

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Noise, Economist, Social Scientist and Nobel prize winner Daniel Kahneman, along with Olivier Sibony and Cass Sunstein, explore the concept of noise, i.e. why most people make bad judgments, and how to correct for it.​  Noise is the variation in outcomes due to human decision making.  For example, when two different claims adjusters at the same insurance company come to radically different conclusions on the value of the same claim.  While noise contributes to significant errors in a diverse spectrum of fields, the individuals and organizations making decisions are usually unaware of the role played by chance in their judgments and in their actions.

Quotes 

“To understand error in judgment, we must understand both bias and noise.”

 

“wherever there is judgment, there is noise—and more of it than you think.”

 

“Bias and noise—systematic deviation and random scatter—are different components of error.”

 

“Judgment can therefore be described as measurement in which the instrument is a human mind.”

 

“There is at least one source of occasion noise that we have all noticed: mood.”

 

“When physicians are under time pressure, they are apparently more inclined to choose a quick-fix solution, despite its serious downsides.”

 

“Averaging two guesses by the same person does not improve judgments as much as does seeking out an independent second opinion. As Vul and Pashler put it, “You can gain about 1/10th as much from asking yourself the same question twice as you can from getting a second opinion from someone else.” This is not a large improvement. But you can make the effect much larger by waiting to make a second guess.”

 

“When Vul and Pashler let three weeks pass before asking their subjects the same question again, the benefit rose to one-third the value of a second opinion.”

 

 “Herzog and Hertwig then averaged the two estimates thus produced. Their technique, which they named dialectical bootstrapping, produced larger improvements in accuracy than did a simple request for a second estimate immediately following the first. Because the participants forced themselves to consider the question in a new light, they sampled another, more different version of themselves—two “members” of the “crowd within” who were further apart. As a result, their average produced a more accurate estimate of the truth. The gain in accuracy with two immediately consecutive “dialectical” estimates was about half the value of a second opinion.”

 

 “A study of thousands of juvenile court decisions found that when the local football team loses a game on the weekend, the judges make harsher decisions on the Monday (and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of the week). Black defendants disproportionately bear the brunt of that increased harshness. A different study looked at 1.5 million judicial decisions over three decades and similarly found that judges are more severe on days that follow a loss by the local city’s football team than they are on days that follow a win.”

 

 “Vul and Pashler drew inspiration from the well-known phenomenon known as the wisdom-of-crowds effect: averaging the independent judgments of different people generally improves accuracy. In 1907, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin and a famous polymath, asked 787 villagers at a country fair to estimate the weight of a prize ox. None of the villagers guessed the actual weight of the ox, which was 1,198 pounds, but the mean of their guesses was 1,200, just 2 pounds off, and the median (1,207) was also very close. The villagers were a “wise crowd” in the sense that although their individual estimates were quite noisy, they were unbiased. Galton’s demonstration surprised him: he had little respect for the judgment of ordinary people, and despite himself, he urged that his results were “more creditable to the trustworthiness of a democratic judgment than might have been expected.”

 

“Most organizations prefer consensus and harmony over dissent and conflict. The procedures in place often seem expressly designed to minimize the frequency of exposure to actual disagreements and, when such disagreements happen, to explain them away.”

 

“Some judgments are biased; they are systematically off target. Other judgments are noisy, as people who are expected to agree end up at very different points around the target. Many organizations, unfortunately, are afflicted by both bias and noise.”

 

“In a negotiation situation, for instance, good mood helps. People in a good mood are more cooperative and elicit reciprocation. They tend to end up with better results than do unhappy negotiators.”

 

“On the other hand, a good mood makes us more likely to accept our first impressions as true without challenging them.”

 

“As you can guess, this is a test of the readers’ vulnerability to stereotypes: do people rate the essay more favorably when it is attributed to a middle-aged man than they do when they believe that a young woman wrote it? They do, of course. But importantly, the difference is larger in the good-mood condition. People who are in a good mood are more likely to let their biases affect their thinking.”

 

“Inducing good moods makes people more receptive to bullshit and more gullible in general; they are less apt to detect deception or identify misleading information. Conversely, eyewitnesses who are exposed to misleading information are better able to disregard it—and to avoid false testimony—when they are in a bad mood.”

 

“However, when the subjects were placed in a positive mood—induced by watching a five-minute video segment—they became three times more likely to say that they would push the man off the bridge. Whether we regard “Thou shalt not kill” as an absolute principle or are willing to kill one stranger to save five should reflect our deepest values. Yet our choice seems to depend on what video clip we have just watched.”

 

“A study of nearly seven hundred thousand primary care visits, for instance, showed that physicians are significantly more likely to prescribe opioids at the end of a long day.”

 

My Take

While Noise is a bit on the dense side, it did introduce me to some new concepts and change the way I look at the world.  For a non-fiction book, that is high praise.

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574.  The Hypnotist’s Love Story 

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Liane Moriarity

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery

466 pages, published October 1, 2011

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Ellen O’Farrell is a professional hypnotherapist with a home office on an Australian beachfront.  With a history of relationship failures, she is excited and hopeful when she begins dating widower Patrick who is an attractive man with a young son.  When Ellen discovers that Patrick’s ex-girlfriend is stalking him, Ellen’s life starts to change in surprising ways.

Quotes 

“The suffragettes didn’t starve themselves for the vote, so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.”

 

“Dying was such an elegant way to leave a relationship. No infidelity, no boredom, no long, complicated conversations late into the night. No “She’s still single, I hear.” No running into each other at parties and weddings. No “She’s stacked on the weight” or “She’s showing her age.” Dying was final and mysterious and gave you the last word forever.”

 

“Perhaps all grown-ups were just children carefully putting on their grown-up disguises each day and then acting accordingly.”

 

“I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin. I read a poem. A pretty, touching poem I thought she would have liked. I should have used my own words. I should have said: No one will ever love me as fiercely as my mother did. I should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways, and they spent years and years trying to have a baby, and when Clara finally got pregnant, they danced around the living room but very slowly, so as not to hurt the baby, and the first two years of her little girl’s life were the happiest of Clara’s life, except then her husband died, and she had to bring up the little girl on her own, before there was a single mother’s pension, before the words “single mother” even existed. I should have told them about how when I was at school, if the day became unexpectedly cold, Mum would turn up in the school yard with a jacket for me. I should have told them that she hated broccoli with such a passion she couldn’t even look at it, and that she was in love with the main character on the English television series Judge John Deed. I should have told them that she loved to read and she was a terrible cook, because she’d try to cook and read her latest library book at the same time, and the dinner always got burned and the library book always got food spatters on it, and then she’d spend ages trying to dab them away with the wet corner of a tea towel. I should have told them that my mum thought of Jack as her own grandchild, and how she made him a special racing car quilt he adored. I should have talked and talked and grabbed both sides of the lectern and said: She was not just a little old lady. She was Clara. She was my mother. She was wonderful.”

 

“If she was handing over a slice of her heart, she wanted the exact same size given back in return. Actually, she really preferred a bigger piece, thank you very much.”

 

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.”

 

“Ellen came out of the nursery from checking on Grace and said, “I love her so much it’s just…” “Excruciating,” supplied her mother. “I know. It doesn’t really get any better. You just learn to live with it.”

 

“It sometimes seemed so peculiar and wrong to her that you could be that intimate with someone, to go to sleep with them and wake up with them, to do really quite extraordinarily personal things together on a regular basis, and then, suddenly, you don’t even know their telephone number, or where they’re living, or working, or what they did today or last week or last year… That’s why break‐ups felt like your skin was being torn from your body. It was actually strange that more people weren’t like Saskia, instead of being so well‐behaved and dignified about it.”

 

“You think love is black and white. All women think that. And they’re wrong. Women are really intelligent except for when they’re being really stupid.”

 

“He was a selfish, pompous, egocentric, nasty man. She did not want to be married to him, but she did not want him to marry someone else. She did not want him, but she wanted him to want her.”

 

“Mum used to say that when she met my dad it was like a perfect love story. I thought Patrick was my perfect love story. Except he’s not. He’s the hypnotist’s love story. I’m the ex-girlfriend in the hypnotist’s love story. Not the heroine. I’m only a minor character.”

 

 “You weren’t meant to admit, even to yourself, how badly you wanted love. The man was meant to be the icing, not the cake.”

“she couldn’t stand to look up another profile on that awful internet dating site and find another middle-aged, bald, chubby man staring smugly at her out of the computer screen, demanding a ‘slim lady who takes care of herself, for snuggles and long walks along the beach’. Yes, she wanted this child to love her and approve of her and save her from snuggles with chubby, smug men.”

 

“Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.”

 

“How do you make a man do something without nagging?” “That,” said Madeline, “is the billion-dollar question.”

 

“I didn’t have enough other people in my life to cover the loss of this many people at once. I didn’t have spare aunties or cousins or grandparents. I didn’t have backup. I didn’t have insurance to cover a loss like this.”

 

“It gave me a shock. A sudden shock of indescribable pain, like when you’re a kid, and you’re hit on the nose with a basketball on a cold morning, and you cannot believe how much it hurts, and your friends all laugh and you want your mother so bad.”

 

“Now for the first time she understood that her mother wasn’t resisting love so much as bearing it. Now she knew that you could love so much it literally hurt: an actual pain in the center of her chest.”

 

My Take

I read The Hypnotist’s Love Story while on a trip to Greece and it was the perfect vacation read.  Hard to put down, fascinating characters who seem like real people and several plot twists to keep things humming along.  I’ve read many Liane Moriarty books and she knows how to spin a compelling tale.

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570.    Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by: 

Author:   Tiffany Dufu

Genre:   Non Fiction, Self Improvement, Memoir

304 pages, published February 14, 2017

Reading Format:   Book

 

Summary

In Drop the Ball, Tiffany Dufu the changes she made after realizing that trying to do it all as a working mother and wife wasn’t working for her and was causing her to feel major stress and resentment.  Her solution was to let things go, especially her preconceived ideas of what success in her professional and personal life looked like, and to enlist the help of her husband, friends and family. 

 

Quotes 

“[These] powerful women understood that success in imperfect. What would happen if we all started speaking honestly and openly about our priorities and the choices we make about how we spend our time? How inspiring would it be to the young women in our offices if they saw female executives who don’t pretend to do it all, but are open and honest about the balls they have dropped to get where they are today? Women need to support one another by being honest about the compromises we make and by speaking openly about the help we require from our partners and other support systems.”

“What you do is less important than the difference you make.”

 

“Just because you’re better at doing something doesn’t mean you doing it is the most productive use of your time.”

 

“Drop the Ball: to release unrealistic expectations of doing it all and engage others to achieve what matters most to us, deepening our relationships and enriching our lives”

 

“Trying to meet impossible expectations will only continue to harm our physical and psychological well-being.”

 

“Done is better than perfect.”

 

“The greatest privilege that men in the workplace have had isn’t a corporate or public policy. It’s a partner at home. A nonpaid working dad (a.k.a. Stay-at-home dad) might be some working moms’ idea of a superhero. But nonpaid working dads are not the ultimate solution. We do not need role reversal; rather, we need a new model of teamwork in which both parents are meaningfully engaged at work and at home, collaboratively making decisions that reflect what matters most to them.”

 

“In 2014, researchers at Penn State found that women who juggle work and home were proportionately much more likely to experience higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol than were men.”

 

“I used to be the queen of domesticity, a Good Housekeeping cover model in the making. I was also an ambitious professional. These two identities had always been on a collision course. But I was oblivious to that fact until after the crash.”

 

“Many women experience a sense of pressure that men rarely do—the pressure to succeed at work and to keep things running smoothly at home, especially when children arrive on the scene.”

 

My Take

As a recent retiree who just dropped her youngest child off at college, I am not the target audience for this book which focuses on strategies for working moms.  However, I found that for the most part the advice offered by Dufu would have been helpful during my busy working mom years.  I definitely recommend it for young women who are in that phase of their life.

 

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564. The $64 Tomato

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:    William Alexander

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Environment, Food, Nature

304 pages, published March 2, 2007

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Bill Alexander writes about his struggles to create an ideal garden on the acreage that comes with a house he and his wife buy in the Hudson River Valley of New York.  What follows is an adventure rivaling the Perils of Pauline.

Quotes 

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count.”

 

“The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.”

 

“Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit.”

 

 “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.”

 

“but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.”

 

“Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.”

 

My Take

The $64 Tomato was a very fun read.  With acerbic and humorous anectdotes, author Bill Alexander brings to life his mighty struggles to create the perfect garden.  This book confirmed my life long aversion to the big garden and made me happy with the few potted herbs and plants that I maintain along with the volunteers who populate our outdoor mountain area.

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562. The Final Solution

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Michael Chabon

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Historical Fiction

131 pages, published November 2005

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

After finishing this hard to follow book, I’m not really sure what it is about.  The characters include Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his African gray parrot and 89 old man who was once a famous detective.

Quotes 

“Long life wore away everything that was not essential.”

 

“The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.”

 

“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man’s mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

 

“it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things.”

 

“He did not fear death exactly, but he had evaded it for so many years that it had come to seem formidable simply by virtue of that long act of evasion. In particular he feared dying in some undignified way, on the jakes or with his face in the porridge.”

  

My Take

This book was in the Boulder Library’s “Recommended by a Librarian” and had the advantage of brevity, so I gave it a try.  What a disappointment! I cannot even tell you what the plot was.  I’ve enjoyed my previous readings of Michael Chabon (especially The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), but this book was a Super Dud.  By all means, skip.

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561. Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Bill Perkins

Genre:   Non Fiction, Personal Finance, Happiness, Self Improvement, Business, Psychology, Economics

240 pages, published July 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

The premise of Die with Zero is that too many people save all of their lives for their retirement and that by the time they retire they can’t enjoy their money.  Instead, author Bill Perkins advocates a different approach to spending where you can maximize your enjoyment of your money throughout your life.

Quotes 

“At the high end, retirees who had $500,000 or more right before retirement had spent down a median of only 11.8 percent of that money 20 years later or by the time they died. That’s more than 88 percent left over—which means that a person retiring at 65 with half a million dollars still has more than $440,000 left at age 85! At the lower end, retirees with less than $200,000 saved up for retirement spent a higher percentage (as you might expect, since they had less to spend overall)—but even this group’s median members had spent down only one-quarter of their assets 18 years after retirement.”

 

“You might think that as people get older, they spend money more freely out of the sheer desire to make the most of it before it’s truly too late. But the opposite tends to happen. In general, spending among American households declines as people age. For example, the Consumer Expenditure Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, found that in 2017, average annual spending for households headed by 55-to-64-year-olds was $65,000; average spending fell to $55,000 for those between 65 and 74; and spending fell again to $42,000 for those 75 and older. This overall decline occurred despite a rise in healthcare expenses, because most other expenses, such as clothing and entertainment, were much lower. The decline in spending over time was even more acute for retirees with more than $1 million in assets, according to separate research conducted by J.P. Morgan Asset Management, which analyzed data from more than half a million of its customers.”

 

“The insurance companies that create annuities often make them seem like investments,” he wrote in a recent explainer about annuities. “But really they’re more like insurance.” Lieber went on: “Like insurance to stave off financial disaster, an annuity is something you purchase to guarantee that you won’t run out of money if you live a long time.” In fact, thinking of annuities as insurance makes them a lot more sensible than thinking of them as investments—because as investments they are not good at all. But that’s not their goal—their goal is to insure you against the risk of outliving your money.”

 

“It’s called consumption smoothing. Our incomes might vary from one month or one year to another, but that doesn’t mean our spending should reflect those variations—we would be better off if we evened out those variations. To do that, we need to basically transfer money from years of abundance into the leaner years. That’s one use of savings accounts. But in my case, I had been using my savings account totally backwards—I was taking money away from my starving younger self to give to my future wealthier self! No wonder Joe called me an idiot.”

 

 

My Take

Die with Zero met one of my basic criteria for a non-fiction book, e.g. it made me think about things in a new way.  My husband Scot and I retired in 2020 (after several years of tapering off) in our early and mid 50’s and have already adopted a lot of the ideas Perkins advocates.  We are spending a lot of money on travel to experience as much of the world as possible before we are too old and/or infirm to do so.  We also plan to use our money to help our kids while we are still alive and it will have the most benefit. We don’t plan to “die with zero,” but we do plan to maximize our enjoyment of life while we can.

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

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Shelby Steele

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

208 pages, published February 24, 2015

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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552. A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life from the Stone Age to the Phone Age

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Greg Jenner

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Science, Anthropology, Humor

368 pages, published January 29, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A Million Years in a Day has an interesting premise.  Author and Historian Greg Jenner follows an average person from the beginning of a typical day to the end.  At each juncture, he delves into how that particular daily practice such as brushing your teeth or eating breakfast has evolved and changed over the past million years.

Quotes 

“between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. The modern toothbrush probably owes more to a certain William Addis who rediscovered the idea in 1780 while serving time in a London jail for inciting a riot. The story goes that, after becoming understandably disappointed with the cleaning power of tooth rags, Addis drilled holes in a pig bone left over from his dinner and affixed bristles from a handy sweeping brush into the recesses. A mere thousand years after the Chinese had invented the toothbrush, Addis had invented the toothbrush. Of course, he was much better at marketing it, and the company he founded is still making hygienic products today.”

 

 “the Indian entrepreneur Sake Dean Mahomet brought traditional Indian champu head massages and vapour baths to Regency Britain, becoming ‘shampooing surgeon’ to King George IV.”

 

“I grew up believing that drinking cow’s milk was normal, and that those who can’t – because it gives them painful flatulence – are the odd ones. But, it turns out that milk-slurpers are the new kids on the block. Our prehistoric ancestors were hunting animals millions of years ago, but it wasn’t until the Neolithic era that humans actually consumed their milk. Is it simply that it hadn’t occurred to us before? Were we too busy hiding from cave lions? Well, maybe. But in reality it’s biology that determined the success of the switchover, not lack of effort. Until about 7,500 years ago, our adult ancestors simply couldn’t process the sugary lactose in milk, just as 70 per cent of the world’s people can’t today. It was only random mutations in the MCM6 gene that produced an enzyme called lactase that stops the uncomfortable build-up of stomach gas.”

 

“The Reuters News Agency, established in 1851 by the German-born Paul Julius Reuter, was the first major news-gathering organisation to acquire scoops and sell them to other newspapers, relying on carrier pigeons and the electric telegraph to deliver the reports speedily.”

 

“According to one theory, fermentation was the whole reason the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution took off in the first place. Alcohol wasn’t a fun by-product of growing crops; crops were a handy offshoot of making alcohol!”

 

My Take

I found A Million Years in a Day to be a fascinating book.  I learned a lot (always a good thing from a non-fiction book) and really enjoyed the clever, witty writing style of accessible Historian Greg Jenner.

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551. My Name is Lucy Barton

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Elizabeth Strout

Genre:   Fiction

193 pages, published January 12, 2016

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

While Lucy Barton, the titular protagaonist, is in a New York City hospital recovering slowly from an confounding infection following an appendectomy, her mother, to whom she hasn’t spoken for many years, comes to visit and stay with her.  Through mulitiple conversations, Lucy and her mother navigate a difficult past relationship and come to an understanding that finally brings some peace to Lucy.

Quotes 

“It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it’s the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.”

 

 “Lonely was the first flavor I had tasted in my life, and it was always there, hidden inside the crevices of my mouth, reminding me.”

 

 “You will have only one story,” she had said. “You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.”

 

“Then I understood I would never marry him. It’s funny how one thing can make you realize something like that. One can be ready to give up the children one always wanted, one can be ready to withstand remarks about one’s past, or one’s clothes, but then—a tiny remark and the soul deflates and says: Oh.”

 

“Because we all love imperfectly.”

 

“But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: This is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”

“But the books brought me things. This is my point. They made me feel less alone.”

 

“You are wasting time by suffering twice. I mention this only to show how many things the mind cannot will itself to do, even if it wants to.”

 

“This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true.”

 

“No one in this world comes from nothing.”

 

“I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another’s hearts.”

 

“I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that’s what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.”

 

“I suspect I said nothing because I was doing what I have done most of my life, which is to cover for the mistakes of others when they don’t know they have embarrassed themselves. I do this, I think, because it could be me a great deal of the time.”

 

“… and that was when I learned that work gets done if you simply do it.”

 

“My more tenderhearted daughter, Becka, said to me during this time, “Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!”

 

“There are times now, and my life has changed so completely, that I think back on the early years and I find myself thinking: It was not that bad. Perhaps it was not. But there are times, too—unexpected—when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East River, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror, I realize I don’t know how others are. So much of life seems speculation.”

 

“Sarah Payne, the day she told us to go to the page without judgment, reminded us that we never knew, and never would know, what it would be like to understand another person fully.”

 

“I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously! I knew I was a writer. I didn’t know how hard it would be. But no one knows that; and that does not matter.)”

 

“It has been my experience throughout life that the people who have been given the most by our government—education, food, rent subsidies—are the ones who are most apt to find fault with the whole idea of government.”

 

 “She said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.”

 

“A person gets tired. The mind or the soul or whatever word we have for whatever is not just the body gets tired, and this, I have decided, is—usually, mostly—nature helping us. I was getting tired. I think—but I don’t know—that he was getting tired too.”

 

“At times these days I think of the way the sun would set on the farmland around our small house in the autumn. A view of the horizon, the whole entire circle of it, if you turned, the sun setting behind you, the sky in front becoming pink and soft, then slightly blue again, as though it could not stop going on in its beauty, then the land closest to the setting sun would get dark, almost black against the orange line of horizon, but if you turn around, the land is still available to the eye with such softness, the few trees, the quiet fields of cover crops already turned, and the sky lingering, lingering, then finally dark. As though the soul can be quiet for those moments. All life amazes me.”

 

“I think of Jeremy telling me I had to be ruthless to be a writer. And I think how I did not go visit my brother and sister and my parents because I was always working on a story and there was never enough time. (But I didn’t want to go either.) There never was enough time, and then later I knew if I stayed in my marriage I would not write another book, not the kind I wanted to, and there is that as well. But really, the ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”

 

“What I mean is, this is not just a woman’s story. It’s what happens to a lot of us, if we are lucky enough to hear that detail and pay attention”

 

“Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: “How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.”

 

“But once in a while I see a child crying with the deepest of desperation, and I think it is one of the truest sounds a child can make.”

 

“Do I understand that hurt my children feel? I think I do, though they might claim otherwise. But I think I know so well the pain we children clutch to our chests, how it lasts our whole lifetime, with longings so large you can’t even weep. We hold it tight, we do, with each seizure of the beating heart: this is mine, this is mine, this is mine.”

 

“There is that constant judgment in this world: How are we going to make sure we do not feel inferior to another?”

 

My Take

After reading and really enjoying three previous books by the Pulitizer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout (Olive Kitteridge, Olive Again, and The Burgess Boys), I picked this book up from the “Librarian Recommends” section of my wonderful Boulder Public Library.  While not quite as good as the other Strout books that I have read, I did really enjoy “My Name is Lucy Barton.”  Strout has a lot of insight into the human condition and writes in such a way that you become engrossed in the lives of the characters and want to see what happens to them.

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