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154. The Bookstore

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Debra Meyler

Genre:  Fiction

343 pages, published August 20, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Bookstore tells the story of Esme Garland, a young, impressionable and idealistic British woman who studying art history at Columbia University in New York.  Shortly after arriving in the States, Esme starts dating Mitchell van Leuven, who is everything Esme thinks she wants:  rich, handsome, confident and successful.  Unfortunately, Mitchell is also an arrogant  jerk who dumps Esme before she can tell him that she is pregnant.  Esme tries to go it alone, but Mitchell manages to worm his way back into her life.  We follow Esme on her rollercoaster relationship where the only source of stability in her life is her part-time job at a quirky book store populated by various unique and warm hearted characters.

 

Quotes

“Used books,” as if someone else has had the best of them and you get the sere husk, or the lees, as if a book isn’t the one thing, the one product, that is forever new. There’s no such thing as a used book. Or there’s no such thing as a book if it’s not being used.”

 

“One age might pass over what another prized, and the next age might then revere it”

 

“People write for ego gratification, not money.”

 

“Things didn’t seem promising initially. I arrived like everyone else did, after swearing that I wasn’t a spy or guilty of moral turpitude, and that I hadn’t got any snails. In the first, bewildering minutes outside JFK, on a Friday night in the rain, I stared out at veering yellow cabs, airport staff screaming abuse at cowboy operators, sleek limos nosing along the bedlam, the whole teetering on the brink of chaos. I thought, as many people do, This is impossible. I won’t be able to manage this. But then, we do manage- we manage to get into the city without being murdered, and wake up the next day still alive, and shortly afterwards we are striding down Broadway in the sun.”

 

“I think there is no difference between love and infatuation. If it works out, we call it love; if it doesn’t, we shrug our shoulders and say it was infatuation. It’s a hindsight word.”

 

“We’re high on the adrenaline of feeling, even though we know it’s fleeting and evanescence. And we’re getting worse — checking texts and emails and Facebook every five minutes, always searching for that next hit of feeling, that next morsel of approval.”

 

“Americans have all these classes that mean they just know odd things, so engineers know about William Blake and poets know about analytical geometry. She probably took one on Aristotle and the politics of gender.”

 

“When people say “to father,” they generally mean that one biological act—the act of begetting a child. It is different with the verb “to mother.” “To mother” implies care. A man’s act of fathering can easily be that one seed sown; a woman’s act of mothering can take up all the rest of her life.”

 

My Take

The Bookstore was an okay read, but nothing really special.  I liked it more when I first read it, but thinking back on it two months later (at the time of writing this review), I discover that it hasn’t worn well.  There was nothing unique or intriguing in it and I found it hard to relate to Esme and her choices.

 

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150. Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Politics

480 pages, published April 18, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko

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

258 pages, published October 25, 1995

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

Whatever your income, always live below your means.”

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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

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143. Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matthew Diffee

Genre:  Humor, Cartoon

240 pages, published May 26, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

From award-winning New Yorker cartoonist Matthew Diffee (editor of The Rejection Collection), Hand Drawn Jokes for Smart Attractive People is an insightful, often hilarious collection cartoons that will appeal to anyone who is beautiful and intelligent.

 

 

My Take

Finally, a book that’s not for everyone!  All kidding aside, this book was a bit of a cheat since it did not take me long to get through it.  However, I did enjoy it and found myself chuckling throughout.  A fun diversion.

 

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141. Desire of the Everlasting Hills

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Beth Roach

Author:   Thomas Cahill

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Theology, Christian

368 pages, published 1997

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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137. Tinkers

Rating:  ☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Paul Harding

Genre:  Fiction

192 pages, published January 1, 2009

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

An old man lies dying.  Propped up in his living room and surrounded by his children and grandchildren, George Washington Crosby drifts in and out of consciousness, back to the wonder and pain of his impoverished childhood in Maine.  As the clock repairer’s time winds down, his memories intertwine with those of his father, an epileptic, itinerant peddler and his grandfather, a Methodist preacher beset by madness.

 

Quotes 

 “And as the ax bites into the wood, be comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it.”

 

“What of miniature boats constructed of birch bark and fallen leaves, launched onto cold water clear as air? How many fleets were pushed out toward the middles of ponds or sent down autumn brooks, holding treasures of acorns, or black feathers, or a puzzled mantis? Let those grassy crafts be listed alongside the iron hulls that cleave the sea, for they are all improvisations built from the daydreams of men, and all will perish, whether from the ocean siege or October breeze.”

 

“Everything is made perish; the wonder of anything at all is that it has not already done so. No, he thought. The wonder of anything is that it was made in the first place. What persists beyond this cataclysm of making and unmaking?”

 

“Who was the greatest business man ever. . . The greatest salesman? Advertiser? Who? . . . It was Jesus. . . Jesus was the founder of modern business. . . he picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world!”

 

“…I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and coloured me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world….”

 

“Howard resented the ache in his heart. He resented that it was there every morning when he woke up… He resented equally the ache and resentment itself. He resented his resentment because it was a sign of his limitations of spirit and humility, no matter that he understood that such was each man’s burden. He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.”

 

My Take

I labored through Tinkers, which has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was happy just to finish it.  Sometimes I think there is an inverse correlation between the prestige of the award bestowed on a book and its readability.  That was certainly the case for me with this book.  There wasn’t much of a plot and what there was seemed to disjointed and uninteresting.  Even worse were the characters.  No one memorable or impressive.  My advice is to skip Tinkers.

 

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133. Blood, Sweat and Tiaras

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Adrienne Rosel Bulinski

Author:   Adrienne Rosel Bulinski

Genre:  Memoir, Non-Fiction, Motivational

344 pages, published September 21, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Blood, Sweat and Tiaras is the memoir of Adrienne Rosel Bulinski, a friend of mind, and a former Miss Kansas who suffered a life changing injury when she was thrown from a horse and almost lost her foot.  The book details Adrienne’s life before the accident, from her childhood to competing in beauty pageants to trying to make it on Broadway to her long, slow, climb back after the accident that almost left her without a foot.   

 

My Take

I was a bit surprised at how readable I found Blood, Sweat and Tiaras.  My friend Adrienne who wrote it is a motivational speaker and marketing maven.  For a new writer, she did a great job relating the story of her life and it definitely held my interest.  I also appreciated her “never give up” message and how she connected it to all of the hurdles in her own life.

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132. Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Carlo Rovelli

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Science

86 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In seven brief lessons, Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli guides readers with through the most transformative physics breakthroughs of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  This entertaining introduction to modern physics explains general relativity, quantum mechanics, elementary particles, gravity, black holes, the complex architecture of the universe, and the role of humans in the strange world Rovelli describes.  “Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world,” Rovelli writes. “And it’s breathtaking.”  

 

Quotes

“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy we are being nothing other than what we can’t help but be:  a part of our world.”

 

“Genius hesitates.”

 

“The very foundation of science is to keep the door open to doubt.”

 

“we are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father, from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain, producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts, offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life and generate offspring”

 

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time- something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

 

“A university student attending lectures on general relativity in the morning and others on quantum mechanics in the afternoon might be forgiven for thinking that his professors are fools, or have neglected to communicate with each other for at least a century.”

 

“Quantum mechanics and experiments with particles have taught us that the world is a continuous, restless swarming of things, a continuous coming to light and disappearance of ephemeral entities. A set of vibrations, as in the switched-on hippie world of the 1960s. A world of happenings, not of things.”

 

“Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home. This strange, multicoloured and astonishing world which we explore – where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere – is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.”

 

“All things are continually interacting with each other, and in doing so each bears the traces of that with which it has interacted: and in this sense all things continuously exchange information about each other.”

 

“It is hardly surprising that there are more things in heaven and earth, dear reader, than have been dreamed of in our philosophy – or in our physics.”

 

“Human beings often cling to their certainties for fear that their opinions will be proven false. But a certainty that cannot be called into question is not a certainty. Solid certainties are those that survive questioning. In order to accept questioning as the foundation for our voyage toward knowledge, we must be humble enough to accept that today’s truth may become tomorrow’s falsehood.”

 

“Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe.”

My Take

In Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, Rovelli explores smallness (exploring the nature of matter at the subatomic level) and largeness (discussing the shape of the universe and the potential for other universes), the kind of topics that may make your head hurt if you think about them too much.  To his credit, my head didn’t hurt as I was reading Rovelli’s fascinating book.  He is an entertaining writer who has a lot of very interesting ideas to convey in just 86 pages.

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130. Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   T. Harv Eker

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

212 pages, published February 15, 2005

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Secrets of the Millionaire Mind is not your typical personal finance book.  Rather than focusing on procedures for getting rich, T. Harv Ecker (“Harv”) emphasizes that before you can achieve great wealth, you may need to change your mindset.  Harv states: “Give me five minutes, and I can predict your financial future for the rest of your life!” He does this by identifying your “money and success blueprint” and shows how rich people think and act differently than most poor and middle-class people.  According to Harv, we all have a personal money blueprints ingrained in our subconscious minds, and it is this blueprint, more than anything, that will determine our financial lives.  Harv then shows you how to reset your money blueprint to create natural and automatic success.

 

Quotes

“If you want to change the fruits, you will first have to change the roots. If you want to change the visible, you must first change the invisible.”

 

“When you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet.””

 

“Recall that thoughts lead to feelings, feelings lead to actions, and actions lead to results. Everything begins with your thoughts—which are produced by your mind.”

 

“The purpose of our lives is to add value to the people of this generation and those that follow.”

 

“Money will only make you more of what you already are.”

 

“The number one reason most people don’t get what they want is that they don’t know what they want.”

 

“What you focus on expands.”

 

“If your motivation for acquiring money or success comes from a nonsupportive root such as fear, anger, or the need to “prove” yourself, your money will never bring you happiness.”

 

  1. Rich people believe “I create my life.” Poor people believe “Life happens to me.”
  2. Rich people play the money game to win. Poor people play the money game to not lose.
  3. Rich people are committed to being rich. Poor people want to be rich.
  4. Rich people think big. Poor people think small.
  5. Rich people focus on opportunities. Poor people focus on obstacles.
  6. Rich people admire other rich and successful people. Poor people resent rich and successful people.
  7. Rich people associate with positive, successful people. Poor people associate with negative or unsuccessful people.
  8. Rich people are willing to promote themselves and their value. Poor people think negatively about selling and promotion.
  9. Rich people are bigger than their problems. Poor people are smaller than their problems.
  10. Rich people are excellent receivers. Poor people are poor receivers.
  11. Rich people choose to get paid based on results. Poor people choose to get paid based on time.
  12. Rich people think “both”. Poor people think “either/or”.
  13. Rich people focus on their net worth. Poor people focus on their working income.
  14. Rich people manage their money well. Poor people mismanage their money well.
  15. Rich people have their money work hard for them. Poor people work hard for their money.
  16. Rich people act in spite of fear. Poor people let fear stop them.
  17. Rich people constantly learn and grow. Poor people think they already know.”

 

“Robert Allen said something quite profound: “No thought lives in your head rent-free.”

 

“It’s not enough to be in the right place at the right time. You have to be the right person in the right place at the right time.”

 

“The first element of change is awareness. You can’t change something unless you know it exists.”

 

“just realize that no amount of money can ever make you good enough. Money can’t make you something you already are.”

 

“How will I know when I’ve completed my mission?” The answer? “If you are still breathing, you are not done.”

 

“WEALTH PRINCIPLE: When the subconscious mind must choose between deeply rooted emotions and logic, emotions will almost always win.”

 

My Take:   I found a lot of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind to be rather hokey.  For example, at the end of every chapter, Harv advises his readers to put their hands on their heads and repeat the mantra “I have a Millionaire Mind.”  Count me skeptical, but I don’t see that working for me.  I did, however, think he had some interesting insights into how certain people will never be wealthy, or will quickly lose their wealth should they somehow obtain some, because of a mindset that is anti-wealth.  I’ve observed this first hand among a few friends and family members.  If you are envious or resentful of rich people, it is highly unlikely that you will ever be rich yourself.   On a related note, my husband and I have noticed that it is very difficult for people to hold onto money when they did not play a part in earning that money in the first place.  I also found Harv’s observation that when you are complaining, you become a living, breathing “crap magnet” to be hilarious and true.

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127. The Zookeeper’s Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Diane Ackerman

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Biography, Animals, World War II

368 pages, published September 17, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Zookeeper’s Wife opens in 1939 with an examination of the idyllic life led by Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the zookeepers who run the Warsaw Zoo and also live on its premises with their young son Rhys and an assortment of adopted wild animals.  Their existence in Eden soon turns into hell when Germany invades Poland dropping bombs that destroy much of Warsaw including a large part of the Zabinski’s zoo.  With most of their animals dead, Jan and Antonina use their zoo as a safe haven and halfway house for more than 300 Jews who would otherwise be destined for concentration camps.   

 

Quotes

“Why was it, she asked herself, that ‘animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.”

 

“God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made – to our peril.”

 

“Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.”

 

“The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life’s ramshackle return.”

My Take

I have read a lot of books about World War II in the past few years and wasn’t sure if I wanted to tackle another one.  However, I’m glad that I gave The Zookeeper’s Wife a chance.  While there is a lot of devotion to the struggle against the Nazis and the suffering of the Jews that it is present in many World War II themed books, The Zookeeper’s Wife offers a unique perspective on this tumultuous time and brings to life the heroic deeds of Jan and Antonina Zabinski.  I can recommend not only this book, but also the movie version starring the beautiful and talented Jessica Chastain.

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