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451. The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Terra McKinish

Author:   Stephen Chbosky

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult

264 pages, published February 1999

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The main character in this young adult fiction book is Charlie, a high school freshman with a very high IQ, a sometimes strained family relationship, a friendship with an extremely cool brother and sister and a dark secret.  Written in a series of letters to a “friend” from Charlie, we get a peek into his life and challenges.

Quotes 

“We accept the love we think we deserve.” 

 

“So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.”

 

“Things change. And friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.”

 

“And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.”

 

“I would die for you. But I won’t live for you.”

 

“There’s nothing like deep breaths after laughing that hard. Nothing in the world like a sore stomach for the right reasons.”

 

“I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.”

 

“It’s just that I don’t want to be somebody’s crush. If somebody likes me, I want them to like the real me, not what they think I am. And I don’t want them to carry it around inside. I want them to show me, so I can feel it too.”

 

My Take

A good, enjoyable read, but I had a tough time relating.  Probably better suited for the teenage set.

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447. A Discovery of Witches

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:  Deborah Harkness

Genre:   Fiction, Fantasy, Romance

579 pages, published February 2011

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The protagonist of A Discovery of Witches is, no surprise, a witch named Diana Bishop.  Diana is a professor at Yale who specializes in the study of alchemy.  Descended from a prominent family of witches, Diana rejects her gift until she discovers a bewitched alchemical manuscript while conducting research at Oxford’s Bodleian Library.  There, she meets Matthew de Clermont, a brilliant geneticist who also happens to be a vampire.  When Matthew and Diana fall in love, they defy the rules set down by the council of witches, vampires and daemons which forbid interspecies fraternization.

Quotes 

“It begins with absence and desire. It begins with blood and fear. It begins with a discovery of witches.”

“Just because something seems impossible doesn’t make it untrue,”

 

“As fast as I can tell there are only two emotions that keep the world spinning year after year…One is fear.  The other is desire.”

 

“Yes, I see that you are behaving like a prince but that doesn’t mean you won’t behave like a devil at the first opportunity.”

 

“It is a blessing as well as a burden to love so much that you can hurt so badly when love is gone.”

 

“All that children need is love, a grown-up to take responsibility for them, and a soft place to land.”

 

“Somewhere in the center of my soul, a rusty chain began to unwind. It freed itself, link by link, from where it had rested, unobserved, waiting for him. My hands, which had been balled up and pressed against his chest, unfurled with it. The chain continued to drop, to an unfathomable depth where there was nothing but darkness and Matthew. At last it snapped to its full length, anchoring me to a vampire. Despite the manuscript, despite the fact that my hands contained enough voltage to run a microwave, and despite the photograph, as long as I was connected to him, I was safe.”

 

“If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it’s only because it doesn’t know that the fire can consume it.”

 

“there’s nothing more powerful than human fear—not magic, not vampire strength. Nothing.”

 

“Scholars do one of two things when they discover information that doesn’t fit what they already know. Either they sweep it aside so it doesn’t bring their cherished theories into question or they focus on it with laserlike intensity and try to get to the bottom of the mystery.”

 

My Take

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443. Plainsong

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Kent Haruf

Genre:   Fiction

301 pages, published August 22, 2000

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Plainsong tells the story of several residents of Holt, a small town in the high plains of rural Colorado.  We meet a high school teacher who is left to raise his two young boys alone, a teenage girl who is kicked out by her mother when she finds herself pregnant and taken in by two elderly, bachelor brothers who raise cattle and a town bully with a proclivity for evil.

Quotes 

“A girl is different. They want things. They need things on a regular schedule. Why, a girl’s got purposes you and me can’t even imagine. They got ideas in their heads you and me can’t even suppose.”

 

“You’re going to die some day without ever having had enough trouble in your life. Not of the right kind anyway.”

 

“You understand? If you can read you can cook. You can always feed yourselves. You remember that.”

 

“Don’t you have any scars? Inside. Do you? Of course. You don’t act like it. I don’t intend to. It doesn’t do much good, does it?”

 

“Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don’t amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?  I can’t say, Raymond said. But I’m going to. That’s what I know.”

 

“You’re not talking to her, Maggie Jones said. You and Raymond don’t talk like you should to that girl. Women want to hear some conversation in the evening. We don’t think that’s too much to ask. We’re willing to put up with a lot from you men, but in the evening we want to hear some talking. We want to have a little conversation in the house.”

 

My Take

Having previously read and enjoyed Our Souls at Night by Kent Haruf, I had high hopes for Plainsong.  While Plainsong is not quite as good as Our Souls, it is still a very good read and the author has some interesting insights into the human condition.  I especially enjoyed the story of two elderly brothers who run a remote ranch and take in a pregnant teenage girl who brings out the best in them.

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442. Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Scheuth and Sue Deans

Author:   Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Genre:   Non Fiction, Science, Psychology, Economics, History, Public Policy

342 pages, published January 25, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Factfulness is an exploration of how the world is doing so much better than people think.  When asked simple questions such as why the world’s population is increasing, how many young women go to school, or how many people live in poverty, most people get the answers wrong by a large order of magnitude regardless of their education, experience or expertise.  Written by Professor of International Health Hans Rosling, along with his two long-time collaborators Anna and Ola, methodically demonstrates how the world is doing much better than we might think.

Quotes 

“There’s no room for facts when our minds are occupied by fear.”

 

“Look for causes, not villains.”

 

“human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.”

 

“Forming your worldview by relying on the media would be like forming your view about me by looking only at a picture of my foot.”

 

“Think about the world. War, violence, natural disasters, man-made disasters, corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer; and the number of poor just keeps increasing; and we will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most Westerners see in the media and carry around in their heads. I call it the overdramatic worldview. It’s stressful and misleading. In fact, the vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale. Perhaps they are not what we think of as middle class, but they are not living in extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have made tremendous progress. This is the fact-based worldview.”

 

“here’s the paradox: the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.”

 

“When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.”

 

“People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn’t know about. That makes me angry. I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I’m a very serious “possibilist”. That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”

 

“Being intelligent—being good with numbers, or being well educated, or even winning a Nobel Prize—is not a shortcut to global factual knowledge. Experts are experts only within their field.”

 

“The macho values that are found today in many Asian and African countries, these are not Asian values, or African values. They are not Muslim values. They are not Eastern values. They are patriarchal values like those found in Sweden only 60 years ago, and with social and economic progress they will vanish, just as they did in Sweden. They are not unchangeable.”

 

“The goal of higher income is not just bigger piles of money. The goal of longer lives is not just extra time. The ultimate goal is to have the freedom to do what we want”

 

“Last year, 4.2 million babies died. That is the most recent number reported by UNICEF of deaths before the age of one, worldwide. We often see lonely and emotionally charged numbers like this in the news or in the materials of activist groups or organizations. They produce a reaction. Who can even imagine 4.2 million dead babies? It is so terrible, and even worse when we know that almost all died from easily preventable diseases. And how can anyone argue that 4.2 million is anything other than a huge number? You might think that nobody would even try to argue that, but you would be wrong. That is exactly why I mentioned this number. Because it is not huge: it is beautifully small. If we even start to think about how tragic each of these deaths is for the parents who had waited for their newborn to smile, and walk, and play, and instead had to bury their baby, then this number could keep us crying for a long time. But who would be helped by these tears? Instead let’s think clearly about human suffering. The number 4.2 million is for 2016. The year before, the number was 4.4 million. The year before that, it was 4.5 million. Back in 1950, it was 14.4 million. That’s almost 10 million more dead babies per year, compared with today. Suddenly this terrible number starts to look smaller. In fact the number has never been lower.”

 

“And thanks to increasing press freedom and improving technology, we hear more, about more disasters, than ever before. When Europeans slaughtered indigenous peoples across America a few centuries ago, it didn’t make the news back in the old world. When central planning resulted in mass famine in rural China, millions starved to death while the youngsters in Europe waving communist red flags knew nothing about it. When in the past whole species or ecosystems were destroyed, no one realized or even cared. Alongside all the other improvements, our surveillance of suffering has improved tremendously. This improved reporting is itself a sign of human progress, but it creates the impression of the exact opposite.”

 

“Ask yourself, “What kind of evidence would convince me to change my mind?” If the answer is “no evidence could ever change my mind about vaccination,” then you are putting yourself outside evidence-based rationality, outside the very critical thinking that first brought you to this point. In that case, to be consistent in your skepticism about science, next time you have an operation please ask your surgeon not to bother washing her hands.”

 

“The next generation is like the last runner in a very long relay race. The race to end extreme poverty has been a marathon, with the starter gun fired in 1800. This next generation has the unique opportunity to complete the job: to pick up the baton, cross the line, and raise its hands in triumph. The project must be completed. And we should have a big party when we are done.”

 

“Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity. Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say “I don’t know.” It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time. Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?” It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.”

 

My Take

While Factfulness is an interesting book, it reminded me very much of two other books that I have read on my quest:  Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks.  All of these books preach the same message, i.e. that things are actually going a lot better in the world than we think they are and that worldwide poverty is in decline.  Factfulness author Hans Rosling backs everything up with facts and makes a compelling case.  I’m not sure how things are going in the world in the age of covid-19 and global shutdown.  I’m hoping we can get back on the positive trajectory that Rosling describes.

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441. Childhood’s End

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Arthur C. Clarke

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

234 pages, published August 1953

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Written in 1952, Childhood’s End describes a world in which a group of beings from outer space appear in spaceships over every city on earth.  Called the Overlords, the extraterrestrial beings are intellectually, technologically, and militarily superior to humankind and exert their benevolent will to unify the planet, eliminate poverty, end war and improve life. With only a few pockets of resistance, humankind agreed and a golden age began.  However, it was not to last.

Quotes 

“No utopia can ever give satisfaction to everyone, all the time. As their material conditions improve, men raise their sights and become discontented with power and possessions that once would have seemed beyond their wildest dreams. And even when the external world has granted all it can, there still remain the searchings of the mind and the longings of the heart.”

 

“Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the nonexistence of Zeus or Thor, but they have few followers now.”

 

“Science is the only religion of mankind.”

 

“Utopia was here at last: its novelty had not yet been assailed by the supreme enemy of all Utopias—boredom.”

 

“In this single galaxy of ours there are eighty-seven thousand million suns. […] In challenging it, you would be like ants attempting to label and classify all the grains of sand in all the deserts of the world. […] It is a bitter thought, but you must face it. The planets you may one day possess. But the stars are not for man.”

 

“man’s beliefs were his own affair, so long as they did not interfere with the liberty of others.”

 

“Western man had relearned-what the rest of the world had never forgotten-that there was nothing sinful in leisure as long as it did not degenerate into mere sloth.”

 

“The world’s now placid, featureless, and culturally dead: nothing really new has been created since the Overlords came. The reason’s obvious. There’s nothing left to struggle for, and there are too many distractions and entertainments. Do you realize that every day something like five hundred hours of radio and TV pour out over the various channels? If you went without sleep and did nothing else, you could follow less than a twentieth of the entertainment that’s available at the turn of a switch! No wonder that people are becoming passive sponges—absorbing but never creating. Did you know that the average viewing time per person is now three hours a day? Soon people won’t be living their own lives any more. It will be a full-time job keeping up with the various family serials on TV!”

 

“Everybody on this island has one ambition, which may be summed up very simply. It is to do something, however small it may be, better than anyone else. Of course, it’s an ideal we don’t all achieve. But in this modern world the great thing is to have an ideal. Achieving it is considerably less important.”

 

My Take

Prior to Childhood’s End, I had never read anything by Arthur C. Clarke.  My favorite science fiction writer has always been Isaac Asimov.  It turned out to be a real treat to read this fascinating tale by one of the genre’s master storytellers.  Although written in 1952, Childhood’s End holds up well.  I had a hard time putting it down and recommend you check it out.

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439. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  David and Tammis Matzinger

Author:   Adam Higginbotham

Genre:   Non Fiction, History, Science, Foreign

561 pages, published February 12, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Midnight in Chernobyl is an exhaustive look at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster which follows individuals from many different facets of the story, from those working in the plant to the scientists who desperately try to mitigate the crisis to the leaders who make the ultimate decisions of life and death.  The book also provides the reader with an inside look at the corruption and rot within the Soviet system that led to both the nuclear disaster and the eventual downfall of the USSR.

Quotes 

“a society where the cult of science had supplanted religion, the nuclear chiefs were among its most sanctified icons—pillars of the Soviet state. To permit them to be pulled down would undermine the integrity of the entire system on which the USSR was built. They could not be found guilty.”

 

“Radiation is all around us. It emanates from the sun and cosmic rays, bathing cities at high altitude in greater levels of background radiation than those at sea level. Underground deposits of thorium and uranium emit radiation, but so does masonry: stone, brick, and adobe all contain radioisotopes. The granite used to build the US Capitol is so radioactive that the building would fail federal safety codes regulating nuclear power plants. All living tissue is radioactive to some degree: human beings, like bananas, emit radiation because both contain small amounts of the radioisotope potassium 40; muscle contains more potassium 40 than other tissue, so men are generally more radioactive than women. Brazil nuts, with a thousand times the average concentration of radium of any organic product, are the world’s most radioactive food.”

 

“Yet the economists in Moscow had no reliable index of what was going on in the vast empire they notionally maintained; the false accounting was so endemic that at one point the KGB resorted to turning the cameras of its spy satellites onto Soviet Uzbekistan in an attempt to gather accurate information about the state’s own cotton harvest.”

 

“For the first time, Soviet scientists admitted that 17.5 million people, including 2.5 million children under seven, had lived in the most seriously contaminated areas of Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia at the time of the disaster. Of these, 696,000 had been examined by Soviet medical authorities by the end of 1986. Yet the official tally of deaths ascribed to the disaster to date remained the same as that announced the previous year: 31.”

 

“A year after Calder Hall opened, in October 1957, technicians at the neighboring Windscale breeder reactor faced an almost impossible deadline to produce the tritium needed to detonate a British hydrogen bomb. Hopelessly understaffed, and working with an incompletely understood technology, they operated in emergency conditions and cut corners on safety. On October 9 the two thousand tons of graphite in Windscale Pile Number One caught fire. It burned for two days, releasing radiation across the United Kingdom and Europe and contaminating local dairy farms with high levels of iodine 131. As a last resort, the plant manager ordered water poured onto the pile, not knowing whether it would douse the blaze or cause an explosion that would render large parts of Great Britain uninhabitable. A board of inquiry completed a full report soon afterward, but, on the eve of publication, the British prime minister ordered all but two or three existing copies recalled and had the metal type prepared to print it broken up. He then released his own bowdlerized version to the public, edited to place the blame for the fire on the plant operators. The British government would not fully acknowledge the scale of the accident for another thirty years.”

 

“As the Era of Stagnation began, the Soviet scientific establishment lavished resources on the immediate priorities of the state—space exploration, water diversion, nuclear power—while emergent technologies, including computer science, genetics, and fiber optics, fell behind.”

 

“and leveling inconveniently situated mountains with atom bombs—or, as the Russian expression went, “correcting the mistakes of nature.”

 

“But of the dozens of dangerous incidents that occurred inside Soviet nuclear facilities over the decades that followed, not one was ever mentioned to the IAEA. For almost thirty years, both the Soviet public and the world at large were encouraged to believe that the USSR operated the safest nuclear industry in the world. The cost of maintaining this illusion had been high.”

 

“the atomic chieftains of NIKIET and the Kurchatov Institute apparently believed that a well-written set of manuals would be enough to guarantee nuclear safety.”

 

“So, to save time, Sredmash decided to skip the prototype stage entirely: the quickest way to find out how the new reactors would work in industrial electricity generation would be to put them directly into mass production.”

 

“the origins of the accident lay with those who had designed the reactor and the secret, incestuous bureaucracy that had allowed it to go into operation.”

 

“The temperature inside the reactor rose to 4,650 degrees centigrade—not quite as hot as the surface of the sun.”

 

“Slowly at first, but then with gathering momentum, the Soviet public began to discover how deeply it had been misled—not only about the accident and its consequences but also about the ideology and identity upon which their society was founded. The accident and the government’s inability to protect the population from its consequences finally shattered the illusion that the USSR was a global superpower armed with technology that led the world. And, as the state’s attempts to conceal the truth of what had happened came to light, even the most faithful citizens of the Soviet Union faced the realization that their leaders were corrupt and that the Communist dream was a sham.”

 

My Take

When I first picked up a thick copy of Midnight in Chernobyl (which clocks in at 561 pages and had been assigned by one of my book groups), I was expecting a bit of a long slog.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Author Adam Higginbotham is a skilled writer who weaves a gripping tale of what went wrong in Chernobyl and how a corrupt Communist system built on deception and covering up unpleasant truths laid the ground work for one of the biggest manmade disasters in the history of the world.  I learned a lot and highly recommend this book.  I also recommend the HBO miniseries Chernobyl which is an engrossing watch.

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437. A Thousand Days in Venice

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Marlena de Blasi

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Memoir

290 pages, published June 3, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

A Thousand Days in Venice tells the story of Marlena de Blasi, a divorced, middle aged American chef and restaurateur, who meets the Italian banker Fernando on the last day of her trip to Venice.  That meeting turns into a romance which turns into a marriage after Marlena uproots her life to become a Venetian and give love another chance.

Quotes 

“Living as a couple never means that each gets half. You must take turns at giving more than getting. It’s not the same as a bow to the other whether to dine out rather than in, or which one gets massaged that evening with oil of calendula; there are seasons in the life of a couple that function, I think, a little like a night watch. One stands guard, often for a long time, providing the serenity in which the other can work at something. Usually that something is sinewy and full of spines. One goes inside the dark place while the other one stays outside, holding up the moon.”

 

“Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet’s wailing, a wind’s warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.”

 

“How strange it is, sometimes, which conversations or events stays with us while so much else melts as fast as April snow.”

 

“Some people ripen, some rot.”

 

“Life is this conto, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.”

 

My Take

A Thousand Days in Venice reminded me a lot of A Year in Provence as it is the type of book that transports and immerses you completely in a different place and culture.  While reading it, I felt like I was in Venice.   De Blasi is a talented and passionate writer and I enjoyed taking this trip with her.

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433. The Case for Easter: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for the Resurrection

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Karen Reader

Author:   Lee Strobel

Genre:   Non Fiction, Theology, Christian

90 pages, published March 26, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Case for Easter is a very short book that focuses on empirical arguments for the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  Author Lee Strobel interviews experts from a number of disciplines to methodically make his case.  In journalistic fashion, he looks at the medical evidence of Christ’s death on the cross, the evidence of the missing body from the tomb and the evidence of Christ’s appearances after death.

Quotes 

 

My Take

While The Case for Easter is a quick read at just 90 pages, author Lee Strobel (who also wrote The Case for Christ), makes compelling and evidenced based arguments for the resurrection of Christ.  Highly recommended during the Easter season.

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429 . Under the Banner of Heaven

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Jon Krakauer

Genre:   Nonfiction, Theology, Crime, History

399 pages, published July 10, 2003

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Under the Banner of Heaven, Jon Krakauer explores the story behind two horrific murders of a young woman and her baby daughter by brothers Ron and Dan Lafferty.  The Lafferty’s were caught up in an offshoot Mormon fundamentalist sect and claimed that they were instructed by God to carry out their gruesome crime.  Additionally, Krakauer examines the Mormon religion in detail, from its origins in the early 1800’s with Joseph Smith, to its settlement in Utah led by Brigham Young to its embrace of polygamy to its modern day incarnation as a mainstream American religion.

Quotes 

“There is a dark side to religious devotion that is too often ignored or denied. As a means of motivating people to be cruel or inhumane, there may be no more potent force than religion. When the subject of religiously inspired bloodshed comes up, many Americans immediately think of Islamic fundamentalism, which is to be expected in the wake of 911. But men have been committing heinous acts in the name of God ever since mankind began believing in deities, and extremists exist within all religions. Muhammad is not the only prophet whose words have been used to sanction barbarism; history has not lacked for Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, and even Buddhists who have been motivated by scripture to butcher innocents. Plenty of these religious extremist have been homegrown, corn-fed Americans.”

 

“Common sense is no match for the voice of God.”

 

“But some things are more important than being happy. Like being free to think for yourself.”

 

“Although the far territory of the extreme can exert an intoxicating pull on susceptible individuals of all bents, extremism seems to be especially prevalent among those inclined by temperament or upbringing toward religious pursuits. Faith is the very antithesis of reason, injudiciousness a crucial component of spiritual devotion. And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off.”

 

“Neither Emma’s tears nor her rage were enough to make Joseph monogamous, however; nor were the prevailing mores of the day. He kept falling rapturously in love with women not his wife. And because that rapture was so wholly consuming, and felt so good, it struck him as impossible that God might possibly frown on such a thing.”

 

“But perhaps the greatest attraction of Mormonism was the promise that each follower would be granted an extraordinarily intimate relationship with God. Joseph taught and encouraged his adherents to receive personal communiqués straight from the Lord. Divine revelation formed the bedrock of the religion.”

 

“Balanced atop the highest spire of the Salt Lake Temple, gleaming in the Utah sun, a statue of the angel Moroni stands watch over downtown Salt Lake City with his golden trumpet raised. This massive granite edifice is the spiritual and temporal nexus of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), which presents itself as the world’s only true religion. Temple Square is to Mormons what the Vatican is to Catholics, or the Kaaba in Mecca is to Muslims. At last count there were more than eleven million Saints the world over, and Mormonism is the fastest-growing faith in the Western Hemisphere. At present in the United States there are more Mormons than Presbyterians or Episcopalians. On the planet as a whole, there are now more Mormons than Jews. Mormonism is considered in some sober academic circles to be well on its way to becoming a major world religion–the first such faith to emerge since Islam.”

 

My Take

I had previously read Into Thin Air and Into the Wild, two terrific page turners also written by the writer Jon Krakauer.  I therefore had high hopes for Under the Banner of Heaven.  While not of the same caliber as Into Thin Air, it was still quite compelling and informative.  I learned a lot about Mormonism (a very weird religion with some very good people who follow it) and how dangerous any type of religious fundamentalism can be.  It certainly got me thinking.

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426. Long Bright River

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Ashley Christianson

Author:   Liz Moore

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Crime

482 pages, published January 7, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Long Bright River takes place in Kensington, a rundown Philadelphia neighborhood that has been decimated by the opioid crisis.  Mickey is a single mother and a beat police officer trying to escape her painful childhood by making a better life with her young son.  Her estranged sister Kacey, from whom whe was once inseparable, is a junkie and a prostitute.  When Kacey disappears and young women begin showing up as murder victims, Mickey risks everything to find her sister before it is too late.

Quotes 

“This was the secret I learned that day: none of them want to be saved. They all want to sink backward toward the earth again, to be swallowed by the ground, to keep sleeping. There is hatred on their faces when they are roused from the dead.”

 

“Who on earth can explain, in words alone, the great gutting tenderness of holding your child in your arms? The animal feeling of it—the baby’s soft muzzle, the baby’s new skin (which throws into relief the wear your own has endured), the little hand reaching up to your face, searching for family. The quick small pats, light as moths, that land on your cheek and chest.”

 

“I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

“Some people do have trouble with Kensington, but to me the neighborhood itself has become like a relative, slightly problematic but dear in the old-fashioned way that that word is sometimes used, treasured, valuable to me.”

 

“I tried hard to ignore the low noise that thrummed throughout my day, some tolling, cautionary bell. I wouldn’t listen. I wanted everything to stay as it was. I was more afraid of the truth than the lie. The truth would change the circumstances of my life. The lie was static. The lie was peaceful. I was happy with the lie.”

 

My Take

I really loved Long Bright River, a gripping, beautifully written thriller that is so much more than a thriller.  Author Liz Moore takes you deep inside the life of Mickey Fitzpatrick, a flawed but deeply human police officer, who struggles to do the right thing as she is repeatedly forced to deal with difficult situations.  The back stories of Mickey and her sister Kacey are heart breaking but ring very true.  I couldn’t put this book down.  Highly recommended.

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