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514. The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:  Bill Bishop

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Politics, Public Policy

384 pages, published May 7, 2008

Reading Format:   E-Book on Hoopla

Summary

The Big Sort is a social science look at the reasons why America has become so culturally and politically divided. In the past several decades, we have sorted ourselves by neighborhood, religion, political beliefs and culture to the point where many of us now live in echo chambers.

Quotes 

“As people seek out the social settings they prefer—as they choose the group that makes them feel the most comfortable—the nation grows more politically segregated—and the benefit that ought to come with having a variety of opinions is lost to the righteousness that is the special entitlement of homogeneous groups.”

 

“like-minded, homogeneous groups squelch dissent, grow more extreme in their thinking, and ignore evidence that their positions are wrong. As a result, we now live in a giant feedback loop, hearing our own thoughts about what’s right and wrong bounced back to us by the television shows we watch, the newspapers and books we read, the blogs we visit online, the sermons we hear, and the neighborhoods we live in.”

 

“Education is presumed to nurture an appreciation of diversity: the more schooling, the greater the respect for works of literature and art, different cultures, and various types of music. Certainly, well-educated Americans see themselves as worldly, nuanced, and comfortable with difference. Education also should make us curious about—even eager to hear—different political points of view. But it doesn’t. The more educated Americans become—and the richer—the less likely they are to discuss politics with those who have different points of view.”

 

“Over the last generation, however, these two moral syndromes emerged in families and then sorted into Republican and Democrat. In 1992, there was little difference between the parties on the child-rearing scale. By 2000, the differences were distinct, and by 2004 the gap had grown wide and deep. Answers to questions about child rearing, in fact, provided a better gauge of party affiliation than did income.* The parenting scale was also more closely aligned with “moral issues” than political orientation. Knowing whether a person was a nurturant parent or a strict father provided a better guide to his or her thinking about gay rights than knowing whether he or she was a liberal or a conservative, a Republican or a Democrat.”

 

“The child-rearing scale also helped explain the steady migration of the white working class away from the Democratic Party. It showed that Evangelicals were largely strict fathers. And in 2004, voters who had attended graduate school had a strict father score on the four-question survey that was only half that of voters who hadn’t graduated from high school. “Little wonder our politics today are polarized,” Hetherington and Weiler concluded. “The values of Republicans and Democrats are very much at odds. We do not agree about the most fundamental of issues.”

 

My Take

While I found The Big Sort to make some interesting points and got me thinking a bit more about our country’s polarization, it was a bit dense and at times a slog to get through.  It would have benefited from more personal anecdotes.

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482. The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben and Drue Emerson

Author:   Lindsey Fitzharris

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Science, Medicine, Health

304 pages, published October 31, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Butchering Art tells the story of Joseph Lister, a Quaker surgeon in nineteenth-century England and Scotland who solved the riddle of post operative infections.  Drawing from the work of friend Louis Pasteur and his own tireless experimentation, Lister proved germ theory and changed the practice of medicine and saving countless lives.

Quotes 

“The adoption of Lister’s antiseptic system was the most prominent outward sign of the medical community’s acceptance of a germ theory, and it marked the epochal moment when medicine and science merged.”

 

“From the moment he looked through the lens of his father’s microscope to the day he was knighted by Queen Victoria, his life was shaped and influenced by his circumstances and the people around him. Like all of us, he saw his world through the prism of opinions held by those whom he admired most:”

 

“Lister understood that being in a hospital could be a terrifying experience and followed his own golden rule: “Every patient, even the most degraded, should be treated with the same care and regard as though he were the Prince of Wales himself.”

 

“The best that can be said about Victorian hospitals is that they were a slight improvement over their Georgian predecessors. That’s hardly a ringing endorsement when one considers that a hospital’s “Chief Bug-Catcher”—whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice—was paid more than its surgeons.”

 

“If Lister had nursed any hope that his diligence and reasoned argument concerning his antiseptic system would convert the American audience, he would be sorely disappointed. One attendee accused him of being mentally unhinged and having a “grasshopper in the head.”

 

“Erysipelas was one of four major infections that plagued hospitals in the nineteenth century. The other three were hospital gangrene (ulcers that lead to decay of flesh, muscle, and bone), septicemia (blood poisoning), and pyemia (development of pus-filled abscesses).”

 

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is almost certainly wrong. —ARTHUR C. CLARKE”

 

“The symptoms syphilis engendered worsened over time. In addition to the unsightly skin ulcers that pockmarked the body in the later stages of the disease, many victims endured paralysis, blindness, dementia, and “saddle nose,” a grotesque deformity that occurs when the bridge of the nose caves into the face. (Syphilis was so common that “no nose clubs” sprang up all over London. One newspaper reported that “an eccentric gentleman, having taken a fancy to see a large party of noseless persons, invited every one thus afflicted, whom he met in the streets, to dine on a certain day at a tavern, where he formed them into a brotherhood.” The man, who assumed the alias of Mr. Crampton for these clandestine parties, entertained his noseless friends every month for a year until his death, at which time the group “unhappily dissolved.”)”

 

“Let us not overlook the further great fact, that not only does science underlie sculpture, painting, music, poetry, but that science is itself poetic.… Those engaged in scientific researches constantly show us that they realize not less vividly, but more vividly, than others, the poetry of their subjects. —HERBERT SPENCER”

 

My Take

I learned a lot about history and medicine from The Butchering Art which focuses on the story of surgeon Joseph Lister and how he demonstrated the role played by germs in causing infections.  Prior to Lister, surgery was a gruesome affair with unsanitary hospitals and many post-operative infections.  We all owe a debt of gratitude to Lister and all of the scientists who were courageous enough to challenge the status quo.

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459. Maybe in Another Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre:   Fiction, Romance

342 pages, published July 7, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

29 year old Hannah Martin is at a crossroads in her life.  Spending her twenties bouncing from city to city and job to job, she returns to her hometown of Los Angeles to be close to her best friend Gabby.  Shortly after relocating, she meets up with ex-boyfriend Ethan at a bar with friends.  At the end of the evening Hannah has to decide whether to go home with Ethan or not.  At this point, the book follows the two differing paths that her life will take depending on that fateful decision.

Quotes 

“I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices and they led me somewhere else, led me to someone else. And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”

 

“Life is long and full of an infinite number of decisions. I have to think that the small ones don’t matter, that I’ll end up where I need to end up no matter what I do.”

 

“When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can’t just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.”

 

“That’s what you do when you want something. You don’t look for reasons why it won’t work. You look for reasons why it will.”

 

“I think I have to believe that life will work out the way it needs to. If everything that happens in the world is just a result of chance and there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, that’s just too chaotic for me to handle. I’d have to go around questioning every decision I’ve ever made, every decision I will ever make. If our fate is determined with every step we take . . . it’s too exhausting. I’d prefer to believe that things happen as they are meant to happen.”

 

“Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices.”

 

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t mean if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.”

 

“I’m just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world we are supposed to love, we’ll find them. In time. The future is so incredibly unpredictable that trying to plan for it is like studying for a test you’ll never take. I’m OK in this moment.”

 

“If you love someone, if you think you could make them happy for the rest of your life together, then nothing should stop you. You should be prepared to take them as they are and deal with the consequences. Relationships aren’t neat and clean. They’re ugly and messy, and they make almost no sense except to the two people in them. That’s what I think. I think if you truly love someone, you accept the circumstances; you don’t hide behind them.”

 

“You can only forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past once you know you’ll never make them again.”

 

“You don’t need to find the perfect thing all the time. Just find one that works, and go with it.”

 

“It’s very easy to rationalize what you’re doing when you don’t know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It’s very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it’s an abstract.”

 

“I don’t believe that being in love absolves you of anything. I no longer believe that all’s fair in love and war. I’d go so far as to say your actions in love are not an exception to who you are. They are, in fact, the very definition of who you are.”

 

My Take

Maybe in Another Life is the first book that I have read by Taylor Jenkins Reid and it was a fun chicklit escape.  In fact, I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it and how quickly I sped through it.  It made me think a bit about the role that both chance and choice play in our life.  While not novel, the characters and plot more than hold your interest until the two satisfying conclusions.

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414. This Is How You Lose the Time War

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Amal El-Mohtar

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction

209 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This Is How You Lose the Time War is written from by two authors, Amal-El Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and is told from the perspectives of Red and Blue, two time-traveling agents from warring futures who are working their way through the past.  Red and Blue begin to exchange letters which leads them to fall in love.

Quotes 

“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.  I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

 

“Adventure works in any strand—it calls to those who care more for living than for their lives.”

 

“And everyone is alive, somewhere in time.”

 

“But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me.  I love you, and I love you, and I want to find out what that means together.”

 

“Love is what we have, against time and death, against all the powers ranged to crush us down.”

 

“I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you.”

 

“It’s amazing how much blue there is in the world if you look. You’re different colors of flame. Bismuth burns blue, and cerium, germanium, and arsenic. See? I pour you into things.”

 

“Some days Blue wonders why anyone ever bothered making numbers so small; other days she supposes even infinity needs to start somewhere.”

 

My Take

While there are some beautiful and poetic parts of This Is How You Lose the Time War, I just couldn’t get into this book.  The plot (what there was of one) was difficult to follow and I often didn’t know what was going on.  However, it may just be me.  There are many others who really like this book.

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414. Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson, Valerie Flores

Author:   Adrienne Brodeur

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir

256 pages, published October 15, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Wild Game is an interesting and unique memoir.  Adrienne Brodeur begins her story on a hot July night on Cape Cod when and her mother Malabar woke her at midnight to tell her 14 year old daughter “Ben Souther just kissed me.”  With these words, the magnetic, complicated, larger than life Malabar started a years long affair and dragged Adrienne in as her accomplice and confidante.

Quotes 

“Loneliness is not about how many people you have around. It’s about whether or not you feel connected. Whether or not you’re able to be yourself.”

 

“Deception takes commitment, vigilance, and a very good memory. To keep the truth buried, you must tend to it. For years and years, my job was to pile on sand – fistfuls, shovelfuls, bucketfuls, whatever the moment necessitated – in an effort to keep my mother’s secret buried.”

 

“I know that no one’s story is simple. And no single story tells the whole truth.”

 

“I turned to memory, knowing full well that it is revisionist and that each time we remember something, we alter it slightly, massaging our perspective and layering it with new understanding in order to make meaning in the present.”

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SøREN KIERKEGAARD”

 

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. —ANAïS NIN”

 

“As any magician knows, it is not the smoke and mirrors that trick people; it is that the human mind makes assumptions and misunderstands them as truths.”

 

“My mother had narrowed her vision and chosen happiness, and I had willingly signed on, both of us ignoring the dangers of the new terrain.”

 

“Blink, and you’ll miss your treasure. Blink again, and you’ll realize that the truth you thought was completely hidden, has materialized some ungainly part of it revealed under new conditions.”

 

“All I knew at that moment was I felt lucky. My mother had chosen me , and, together, we were embarking on a great adventure.”

 

“If there was one truth that I’d learned from all my reading, it was this: Happy endings do not apply to everyone. Someone is always left out of that final, jubilant scene. This time, that someone was me.”

 

“I knew only what pleased my mother; I didn’t have a moral compass. It would be years before I understood the forces that shaped who she was and who I became and recognized the hurt that we both caused.”

 

“Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along the inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it…

Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Wild Game, a compelling page turning memoir.  Author Adrienne Brodeur tells a fascinating story of the many years she spent since the age of fourteen as her mother’s accomplice in hiding an affair with her stepfather’s best friend.  Brodeur paints a fascinating portrait of her mother Malabar whose unparalleled narcissism almost ruins her daughter’s life.  Highly recommended.

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329. The Great Alone

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Drue Emerson

Author:   Kristin Hannah

Genre:  Fiction, Historical Fiction

435 pages, published February 6, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Great Alone takes place in 1974 Alaska when 13 year old Leni Albright moves there with her father, Ernt, an impulsive and unstable former Vietnam POW, and her mother Cora, whose alternating deferral to and taunting of Ernt causes even more trouble for this already troubled family.  The Albrights move to Alaska for yet another “fresh start” and attempt to make a go of it with little in the way of resources or knowledge necessary to survive.  When Ernt’s mental state deteriorates and her family begins to fracture, Leni must make difficult decisions in order to survive.

Quotes 

“Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“You know what they say about finding a man in Alaska—the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”

 

“Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.”

 

“A girl was like a kite; without her mother’s strong, steady hold on the string, she might just float away, be lost somewhere among the clouds.”

 

“How will I stop loving him, Mama? Will I …. forget ?

Mama sighed.

Ah. That. Love doesn’t fade or die, baby girl. People tell you it does, but it doesn’t. If you love him now, you’ll love him in ten years and in forty. Differently, maybe , a faded version, but he’s part of you now. And you are part of him.”

 

“You have a child, so you know. You are my heart, baby girl. You are everything I did right. And I want you to know I would do it all again, every wonderful terrible second of it. I would do years and years of it again for one minute with you.”

 

“All this time, Dad had taught Leni how dangerous the outside world was. The truth was that the biggest danger of all was in her own home.”

 

“They were trapped, by environment and finances, but mostly by the sick, twisted love that bound her parents together.”

 

“Leni saw suddenly how hope could break you, how it was a shiny lure for the unwary. What happened to you if you hoped too hard for the best and got the worst?”

 

“Did adults just look at the world and see what they wanted to see, think what they wanted to think? Did evidence and experience mean nothing?”

 

“It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.” 

My Take

As a big fan of Kristin Hannah, having previously really enjoyed Winter Garden and The Nightingale, I was looking forward to reading The Great Alone.  I liked it, but not nearly as much as her previous books which were more gripping page turners.  The characters and the plot in The Great Alone were not quite as compelling as Hannah’s previous efforts.  Still a good, just not great, read.

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