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419. Loserthink: How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Scott Adams

Genre:   Nonfiction, Psychology, Self Improvement, Politics

256 pages, published November 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Loserthink is famed Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams take on why people make bad decisions, like letting your ego have too much control, thinking with words instead of reasons, failing to imagine alternative explanations, and making too much of coincidences.

Quotes 

“If bad memories are keeping you from being happy, try crowding out the destructive memories with new and interesting thoughts. Stay busy, in mind and body, and time is on your side.”

 

“There are three important things to know about human beings in order to understand why we do the things we do. Humans use pattern recognition to understand their world. Humans are very bad at pattern recognition. And they don’t know it.”

 

“The best solution to a problem is often unrelated to who is at fault. It is loserthink to believe otherwise.”

 

“If you can’t imagine any other explanation for a set of facts, it might be because you are bad at imagining things.”

 

“If all you know is how many times someone hit a target, it is loserthink to judge how accurate they are. You also need to know how many times they missed.”

 

“Never be yourself if you can make yourself into something better through your conscious actions. You are what you do.”

 

“It is helpful to think of your mind as having limited shelf space. If you fill that space with negative thoughts, it will set your mental filters to negativity and poor health, and there will be no space left for healthy, productive, and uplifting thoughts. You can control your mental shelf space—to a degree—by manipulating your physical surroundings. In the case of pharmaceutical commercials, it means changing the channel so you are not bombarded with unhealthy thoughts that can wreck your mind and body over time. I will pause here to note that science is solidly on my side.  So is nearly every self-help guru.”

  

My Take

During my reading quest, I had previously read Scott Adams’ How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:  Kind of the Story of My Life and Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.  I preferred both of these books to Loserthink.  It’s not a bad book and has some interesting ideas.  It’s just not nearly as good as Adams’ previous efforts.

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416. Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me)

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Gary Janetti

Genre:   Nonfiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays

159 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Do You Mind If I Cancel?  is a humorous memoir of essays by Gary Janetti, a television writer and producer for some of the most popular television comedies of all time.

Quotes 

“Let’s see, what else? Don’t go into debt over clothes. Hug your dogs while you have them. Know that you can skip most anything. You will fall in love eventually. Remember that. Also, the things you like aren’t weird. Don’t worry about being normal. It’s an awful thing to aspire to.”

“You will derive much satisfaction in later life simply by shooting looks at people.”

 

“This is also very important. Never take the first table they offer you in a restaurant. Don’t even start walking with the host until you know where you’re going. “What table were you thinking of giving us?” always lets them know you mean business right off the bat. Never sit by the door, near a waiter station, or across from the bathroom. Always take the seat facing out to the room. If there is a booth available you definitely want that.”

 

“I’d go through the swinging doors into the kitchen, hunch over the trash can and begin shoveling the uneaten food into my mouth as fast as I could. When the door would once again swing open I’d look up, frozen in fear, with half a baked potato sticking out of my mouth and when I’d see it was just another waiter I’d resume my pose over the trash can and continue frantically shoveling it down my throat. Raccoons had more dignity than I did.”

 

My Take

I gave this book a rare 4 ½ stars because there were parts of it that were so funny that I couldn’t stop laughing.  In fact, I laughed so hard that my sides actually hurt.  That is a rare thing and should be rewarded.

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415. Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   John Ortberg

Genre:   Nonfiction, Christian, Theology

208 pages, published April 22, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Soul Keeping is an in depth exploration of the state of your soul and has prescriptions for how to improve it.  By trying to buy your way to happiness and focus on the material concerns of the world, your soul will pay the price.  In this practical and spiritual book, author John Ortberg helps you to discover your soul, which is the most important connection to God.

Quotes 

“You must arrange your days so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy, and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

“Many Christians expend so much energy and worry trying not to sin. The goal is not to try to sin less.  In all your efforts to keep from sinning, what are you focusing on? Sin. God wants you to focus on him.  To be with him. “Abide in me.” Just relax and learn to enjoy his presence.  Every day is a collection of moments, 86,400 seconds in a day.  How many of them can you live with God? Start where you are and grow from there. God wants to be with you every moment.”

 

“Being right is actually a very hard burden to be able to carry gracefully and humbly. That’s why nobody likes to sit next to the kid in class who’s right all the time. One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.”

 

“If your soul is healthy, no external circumstance can destroy your life. If your soul is unhealthy, no external circumstance can redeem your life.”

 

“Your soul is what integrates your will (your intentions), your mind (your thoughts and feelings, your values and conscience), and your body (your face, body language, and actions) into a single life. A soul is healthy — well-ordered — when there is harmony between these three entities and God’s intent for all creation. When you are connected with God and other people in life, you have a healthy soul.”

 

“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”

 

“If you ask people who don’t believe in God why they don’t, the number one reason will be suffering. If you ask people who believe in God when they grew most spiritually, the number one answer will be suffering.”

 

“In the Bible, God never gives anyone an easy job. God never comes to Abraham, or Moses, or Esther and says, “I’d like you to do me a favor, but it really shouldn’t take much time. I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you.” God does not recruit like someone from the PTA. He is always intrusive, demanding, exhausting. He says we should expect that the world will be hard, and that our assignments will be hard.”

 

“The soul integrates the will and mind and body. Sin disintegrates them. In sin, my appetite for lust or anger or superiority dominates my will. My will, which was made to rule my body, becomes enslaved to what my body wants. When I flatter other people, I learn to use my mouth and my face to conceal my true thoughts and intentions. This always requires energy: I am disintegrating my body from my mind. I hate, but I can’t admit it even to myself, so I must distort my perception of reality to rationalize my hatred: I disintegrate my thoughts from the reality. Sin ultimately makes long-term gratitude or friendship or meaning impossible. Sin eventually destroys my capacity even for enjoyment, let alone meaning. It distorts my perceptions, alienates my relationships, inflames my desires, and enslaves my will. This is what it means to lose your soul.”

 

“For the soul to be well, it needs to be with God.”

 

“A very simple way to guard your soul is to ask yourself, “Will this situation block my soul’s connection to God?” As I begin living this question I find how little power the world has over my soul. What if I don’t get a promotion, or my boss doesn’t like me, or I have financial problems, or I have a bad hair day? Yes, these may cause disappointment, but do they have any power over my soul? Can they nudge my soul from its center, which is the very heart of God? When you think about it that way, you realize that external circumstances cannot keep you from being with God. If anything, they draw you closer to him.”

 

“A paradox of the soul is that it is incapable of satisfying itself, but it is also incapable of living without satisfaction. You were made for soul-satisfaction, but you will only ever find it in God. The soul craves to be secure. The soul craves to be loved. The soul craves to be significant, and we find these only in God in a form that can satisfy us. That’s why the psalmist says to God, “Because your love is better than life . . . my soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods.” Soul and appetite and satisfaction are dominant themes in the Bible — the soul craves because it is meant for God. “My soul, find rest in God.”

 

“I was operating on the unspoken assumption that my inner world would be filled with life, peace, and joy once my external world was perfect.”

 

“A soul without a center feels constantly vulnerable to people or circumstances.”

 

“The best place to start doing life with God is in small moments.”

 

“The soul seeks God with its whole being. Because it is desperate to be whole, the soul is God-smitten and God-crazy and God-obsessed. My mind may be obsessed with idols; my will may be enslaved to habits; my body may be consumed with appetites. But my soul will never find rest until it rests in God.”

 

“We will always take the most care of that which we value most deeply.”

 

“The soul was not made to run on empty. But the soul doesn’t come with a gauge. The indicators of soul-fatigue are more subtle: • Things seem to bother you more than they should. Your spouse’s gum-chewing suddenly reveals to you a massive character flaw. • It’s hard to make up your mind about even a simple decision. • Impulses to eat or drink or spend or crave are harder to resist than they otherwise would be. • You are more likely to favor short-term gains in ways that leave you with high long-term costs. Israel ended up worshiping a golden calf simply because they grew tired of having to wait on Moses and God. • Your judgment is suffering. • You have less courage. “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” is a quote so ubiquitious that it has been attributed to General Patton and Vince Lombardi and Shakespeare. The same disciples who fled in fear when Jesus was crucified eventually sacrificed their lives for him. What changed was not their bodies, but their souls.”

 

“Here’s the deal: The more you think you’re entitled to, the less you will be grateful for. The bigger the sense of entitlement, the smaller the sense of gratitude. We wonder why in our world we keep getting more and more and more and keep being less and less and less grateful.”

 

“The “with God” life is not a life of more religious activities or devotions or trying to be good. It is a life of inner peace and contentment for your soul with the maker and manager of the universe. The “without God” life is the opposite. It is death. It will kill your soul.”

 

“Our problem is that this world does not teach us to pay attention to what matters. We circulate résumés that chronicle what we have accomplished, not who we have become. The advertisements we watch, the conversations we hold, the criteria by which we are judged, and the entertainment we consume all inflame our desire to change our situation, while God waits to redeem our souls.”

 

“Despite the rise of the mental health profession, people are becoming increasingly vulnerable to depression. Why? Martin Seligman, a brilliant psychologist with no religious ax to grind, has a theory that it’s because we have replaced church, faith, and community with a tiny little unit that cannot bear the weight of meaning. That’s the self. We’re all about the self. We revolve our lives around ourselves.”

 

“We’re generally quite good at doing something, but we’re really bad at doing nothing.”

 

“Good habits are enormously freeing — we accomplish good things almost on autopilot. One study from Duke University found that more than 40 percent of the actions people take every day aren’t decisions, but habits. Good habits free us, but when sin becomes a habit, our souls lose their freedom.”

 

“The alternative to soul-acceptance is soul-fatigue. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the body. When we stay up too late and rise too early; when we try to fuel ourselves for the day with coffee and a donut in the morning and Red Bull in the afternoon; when we refuse to take the time to exercise and we eat foods that clog our brains and arteries; when we constantly try to guess which line at the grocery store will move faster and which car in which lane at the stoplight will move faster and which parking space is closest to the mall, our bodies grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the mind. When we are bombarded by information all day at work . . . When multiple screens are always clamoring for our attention . . . When we carry around mental lists of errands not yet done and bills not yet paid and emails not yet replied to . . . When we try to push unpleasant emotions under the surface like holding beach balls under the water at a swimming pool . . . our minds grow weary. There is a kind of fatigue that attacks the will. We have so many decisions to make. When we are trying to decide what clothes will create the best possible impression, which foods will bring us the most pleasure, which tasks at work will bring us the most success, which entertainment options will make us the most happy, which people we dare to disappoint, which events we must attend, even what vacation destination will be most enjoyable, the need to make decisions overwhelms us. The sheer length of the menu at Cheesecake Factory oppresses us. Sometimes college students choose double majors, not because they want to study two fields, but simply because they cannot make the decision to say “no” to either one. Our wills grow weary with so many choices.”

 

“I am so wrapped up in the hurt I have received that I do not notice the hurt I inflict.”

 

“When evangelist Billy Graham’s wife, Ruth, died in 2007, she chose to have engraved on her gravestone words that had nothing to do with her remarkable achievements. It had to do with the fact that as long as we are alive, God will be working on us, and then we will be free. She had been driving one day along a highway through a construction site, and there were miles of detours and cautionary signs and machinery and equipment. She finally came to the last one, and this final sign read, “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” That’s what is written over Ruth Graham’s grave: “End of construction. Thank you for your patience.” Construction today. Freedom tomorrow.”

 

My Take

I read Soul Keeping as part of my women’s bible study and found it to be one of the best bible study books that I have read in the past 10 years.  Ortberg is a gifted writer and makes a lot of good, thought provoking points.  I also appreciated that he shared a number of personal details, vulnerably opening himself up to the reader.  I came away from reading this book with some valuable takeaways.

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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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412. The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Marina Keegan

Genre:   Nonfiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Essays, Memoir

208 pages, published April 8, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

The Opposite of Loneliness is a collection of essays written by Marina Keegan , a talented young writer whose title essay captured the world’s attention in 2012.   Tragically, five days after her graduation from Yale, Keegan died in a car crash.  The 22 year old had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker.  The essays and stories included in The Opposite of Loneliness give voice to the struggles young people confront as they try to figure out their place in the world.

Quotes 

“We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.”

 

“We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.”

 

“We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I want enough time to be in love with everything . . .”

 

“I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.”

 

“And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.”

 

“something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.”

 

“We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves.”

 

“What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.”

 

“I will live for love, and the rest will take care of itself.”

 

“I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning.  At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.”

 

“The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.”

 

My Take

While I enjoyed reading some of the essays in The Opposite of Loneliness, it is really written for a younger generation than me.  Keegan is also a bit uneven.  Some of her work is quite good, but other essays not so much.

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408. A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Foster Wallace

Genre:   Nonfiction, Essays, Humor, Memoir

353 pages, published February 2, 1998

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

This book by the much praised David Foster Wallace is a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling on a Caribbean cruise.

Quotes 

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

 

“I have filled 3 Mead notebooks trying to figure out whether it was Them or Just Me.”

 

“Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody’s ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear.”

 

“I have now seen sucrose beaches and water a very bright blue. I have seen an all-red leisure suit with flared lapels. I have smelled suntan lotion spread over 2,100 pounds of hot flesh. I have been addressed as “Mon” in three different nations. I have seen 500 upscale Americans dance the Electric Slide. I have seen sunsets that looked computer-enhanced. I have (very briefly) joined a conga line.”

 

“I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable–if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.”

 

“One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who had this queer deep sense as a kid? — that everything exterior to me existed only insofar as it affected me somehow? — that all things were somehow, via some occult adult activity, specially arranged for my benefit?”

 

“Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval.”

 

“I think the world divides neatly into those who are excited by the managed induction of terror and those who are not. I do not find terror exciting. I find it terrifying. One of my basic goals is to subject my nervous system to as little total terror as possible. The cruel paradox of course is that this kind of makeup usually goes hand in hand with a delicate nervous system that’s extremely easy to terrify.”

 

“Because of the way human beings relate to narrative, we tend to identify with those characters we find appealing. We try to see ourselves in them. The same I.D.-relation, however, also means that we try to see them in ourselves. When everybody we seek to identify with for six hours a day is pretty, it naturally becomes more important to us to be pretty, to be viewed as pretty. Because prettiness becomes a priority for us, the pretty people on TV become all the more attractive, a cycle which is obviously great for TV. But it’s less great for us civilians, who tend to own mirrors, and who also tend not to be anywhere near as pretty as the TV-images we want to identify with. Not only does this cause some angst personally, but the angst increases because, nationally, everybody else is absorbing six-hour doses and identifying with pretty people and valuing prettiness more, too. This very personal anxiety about our prettiness has become a national phenomenon with national consequences.”

 

“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.”

 

“….basically the sort of guy who looks entirely at home in sockless white loafers and a mint-green knit shirt from Lacoste.”

 

“Can you “choose” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary for choosing are not yet yours?”

 

My Take

While I had heard of David Foster Wallace of Infinite Jest fame, I had never read his writing.  Thus, when I saw A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again recommended as part of best of the nonfiction books of the past 30 years, I decided to give it a try.   Wallace is a unique and talented voice and made me think about certain things in a new way.  His essay on the cruise vacation also had some very funny moments.  However, other parts of the book were a bit too dense for me and more of an acquired taste.

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407. Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Ronan Farrow

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Politics

448 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Catch and Kill is the story behind Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Ronan Farrow’s groundbreaking story in which he helped to expose the powerful interests, including his own employer NBC News, who conspired to protect serial predator Harvey Weinstein and how that scandal ignited the “Me Too” feminist movement.

Quotes 

“In the end, the courage of women can’t be stamped out. And stories – the big ones, the true ones – can be caught but never killed.”

 

“You know, the press is as much part of our democracy as Congress or the executive branch or the judicial branch. It has to keep things in check. And when the powerful control the press, or make the press useless, if the people can’t trust the press, the people lose. And the powerful can do what they want.”

 

“I think that it doesn’t matter if you’re a well-known actress, it doesn’t matter if you’re twenty or if you’re forty, it doesn’t matter if you report or if you don’t, because we are not believed. We are more than not believed—we are berated and criticized and blamed.”

 

“Look at what’s happening! No one on these calls wants to own any of this, because it’s so obviously bad! It’s like a reverse Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone wants it dead, nobody wants to stab it!”

 

“I called Maddow, who listened, and said no one tells her how to run her show. And so it came to pass that, all through the two years after the Weinstein story, I appeared on her show, and never again on any other NBC or MSNBC program.”

 

“Weinstein laughed. “You couldn’t save someone you love, and now you think you can save everyone.” He really said this. You’d think he was pointing a detonator at Aquaman.”

 

“Ultimately, the reason Harvey Weinstein followed the route he did is because he was allowed to, and that’s our fault. As a culture that’s our fault.”

 

“Bourdain said Weinstein’s predation was sickening, that “everyone” had known about it for too long. “I am not a religious man,” he wrote. “But I pray you have the strength to run this story.”

 

“All the women before feel I am their fault,” she said. “And if there were women after me, I feel that is my fault.”

 

“The writer and actor Lena Dunham disclosed how, during the 2016 campaign, she’d told Clinton’s staff that the campaign’s reliance on Weinstein as a fund-raiser and event organizer was a liability. “I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point,” she recalled telling a communications staffer, one of several she said she warned.”

 

“She had graduated from the best Ivy League institutions, in the sequence required to achieve maximum prestige.”

 

My Take

I had loosely followed the Harvey Weinstein story while it was all over the news and therefore had an interest in reading Catch and Kill.  Ronan Farrow narrates a compelling story of just how hard and how many obstacles had to be overcome before dam burst and Harvey Weinstein got his due.  It was especially troubling to see how corrupt NBC News was in covering up for Weinstein and Today show host Matt Lauer.  Hopefully, the world we be spared from future Harvey Weinsteins.

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404. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Sue Deans

Author:  Alex Kotlowitz

Genre:   Nonfiction, Crime, Sociology

304 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Alex Kotlowitz, the bestselling author of There Are No Children Here, embeds himself in Chicago’s most turbulent neighborhoods during one summer to give a report from the inside.  The violence is staggering.  Over the past twenty years in Chicago, 14,033 people have been killed and another roughly 60,000 wounded by gunfire.  An American Summer paints a bleak portrait of despair and violence in America.

Quotes 

“. . .you can’t talk about death without celebrating life. How amid the devastation, many still manage to stay erect in a world that’s slumping around them. How despite the bloodshed, some manage, heroically, not only to push on but also to push back. How in death there is love.”

 

“There are so many . . . who carry the violence, who keep moving forward enshrouded in its aftermath. Yet there doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency, especially among the rest of us.”

 

“In a nation that likes to see itself as forgiving, we are mulishly unforgiving of those who have committed a felony…”

 

“Do you directly target the violence because it so discourages any kind of economic development? Or do you bring in jobs and rehab homes, knowing that with a sense of opportunity the violence will diminish?”

 

“The only thing you can do is love, because it is the only thing that leaves light inside you, instead of the total, obliterating darkness.”

 

“I’m going to share something I learned since I been here and that is us as people when we have difficulty on our journey of life we tend to focus on what we need at the moment that we forget what we already have…”

 

“People have a capacity to keep going even when their world has been shattered. We all long for connection, for affirmation that our lives matter.”

 

“You grow up in a community with abandoned homes, a jobless rate of over 25 percent, underfunded schools, and you stand outside your home, look at the city’s gleaming downtown skyline, at its prosperity, and you know your place in the world.”

 

“The shooting doesn’t end. Nor does the grinding poverty. Or the deeply rooted segregation. Or the easy availability of guns. Or the shuttered schools and boarded-up homes. Or the tensions between police and residents. And yet each shooting is unlike the last, every exposed and bruised life exposed and bruised in its own way.”

 

My Take

Man, this was a depressing book.  While Alex Kotlowitz does a good job of vividly describing the heartbreaking violence and hopelessness in the gang infested parts of Chicago, he offers no solutions.  We discussed this book at my Rotary book club and also were disheartened.  There are no easy answers.

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403. The Year of Living Danishly: My Twelve Months Unearthing the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   Heather Ringoen

Author:   Helen Russell

Genre:    Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, Foreign

304 pages, published May 19, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Brit Helen Russell was living in London and facing burn out.  When her husband gets a job at Lego in Denmark, which is officially the happiest nation on Earth, they decide to take the leap and try out a year of living Danishly in rural Jutland.  In this book, Russell explores all the things that make the Danes so perennially happy.

Quotes 

“Psychologists at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, found that the better educated and wealthier a nation is, the less likely its population is to believe in a higher being. The Global Index of Religion and Atheism also assessed that poverty was a key indicator of a society’s tendency towards religion – so that poorer countries tend to be the most religious. The one exception to the rule? America.”

 

“He tells me about a word he’s been taught that encapsulates the Danish attitude to work: ‘arbejdsglæde’ – from ‘arbejde’ the Danish for ‘work’ and ‘glæde’ from the word for ‘happiness’. It literally means ‘happiness at work’; something that’s crucial to living the good life for Scandinavians. The word exists exclusively in Nordic languages, and hasn’t been found anywhere else in the world.”

 

“Continuing to learn throughout life helps improve mental well-being, boosts self-confidence, gives you a sense of purpose and makes you feel more connected to others, according to the Office for National Statistics.”

 

“Danes do have a good work-life balance on the whole. ‘And if we don’t, we usually do something about it. You ask yourself, “are you happy where you are?” If the answer’s “yes” then you stay. If it’s “no”, you leave. We recognise that how you choose to spend the majority of your time is important. For me, it’s the simple life – spending more time in nature and with family. If you work too hard, you get stressed, then you get sick, and then you can’t work at all.”

 

“Happiness is the things you possess divided by the things you expect.”

 

“the fact that I was dreaming of retirement at the age of 33 was probably an indicator that something had to change.”

 

“When he puts it like this, it sounds surprisingly sensible. Danes have a collective sense of responsibility – of belonging, even. They pay into the system because they believe it to be worthwhile. The insanely high taxation also has some happy side effects. It means that Denmark has the lowest income inequality among all the OECD countries, so the difference in take-home wages between, for instance, Lego’s CEO and its lowliest cleaner, isn’t as vast as it might be elsewhere. Studies show that people who live in neighbourhoods where most people earn about the same amount are happier, according to research from San Francisco State University and the University of California Berkeley. In Denmark, even people working in wildly different fields will probably have a similar amount left in the bank each month after tax. I’m interested in the idea that income equality makes for better neighbours and want to put it to the test. But since I live in what is essentially a retirement village, where no one apart from Friendly Neighbour works, there isn’t much of an opportunity in Sticksville. So I ask Helena C about hers. She tells me that the street she lives in is populated by shop assistants, supermarket workers, accountants, lawyers, marketers and a landscape gardener. ‘Everyone has a nice home and a good quality of life,’ she says, ‘it doesn’t matter so much what you do for work here.’ Regardless of their various careers and the earning potential that this might afford them in other countries with lower taxes, professionals and non-professionals live harmoniously side by side in Denmark. This also makes social mobility easier, according to studies from The Equality Trust on the impact of income equality. So you’re more likely to be able to get on in life, get educated and get a good job, regardless of who your parents are and what they do in Denmark than anywhere else. It turns out that it’s easier to live ‘The American Dream’ here than it’s ever likely to be in the US.”

 

“inhabitants paid cripplingly high taxes. Which meant that we would, too. Oh brilliant! We’ll be even more skint by the end of the month than we are already… But for your Danish krone, I learned, you got a comprehensive welfare system, free healthcare, free education (including university tuition), subsidised childcare and unemployment insurance guaranteeing 80 per cent of your wages for two years.”

 

“I Google ‘new country, Denmark, culture shock’ on my phone and drink coffee furiously. I learn that Danes drink the most coffee in Europe, as well as consuming eleven litres of pure alcohol per person per year. Maybe we’ll fit in just fine after all.”

 

“You know you’re going to get taxed a lot anyway, so you may as well just focus on doing what you love, rather than what’s going to land you a massive salary.”

 

“I call up the happiness economist Christian Bjørnskov who I spoke to at the start of my adventure to ask for his perspective. He confirms that this level of trust is key to keeping Danes so damned happy. As he told me before I started my quest, ‘life is so much easier when you can trust people’, and this is regardless of whether you’re actually about to get your bank account wiped or have your house burgled. ‘So if I feel safe and trust the people around me, I’m less likely to feel stressed or anxious. I have the headspace to be happy?’ ‘Exactly,’ he tells me. ‘And countries with a major welfare state tend to be high-trust countries, though the high levels of trust in Denmark aren’t necessarily caused by the welfare state.”

 

“Research shows that great art and design can even induce the same brain activity as being in love – something Denmark cottoned on to 90-odd years ago.”

 

“After two weeks of paternity leave post-birth, (my husband) goes back to work before tying up loose ends to take ten weeks off to care for his baby. He has a big shiny job at one of the country’s most profitable companies, but a dad taking time out, fully paid, to look after his child is recognised as something that’s important and so is encouraged.”

 

“Danes actually work an average of just 34 hours a week. Employees are entitled to five weeks’ paid holiday a year, as well as thirteen days off for public holidays. This means that Danes actually only work an average of 18.5 days a month.”

 

“a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition confirming that home-cooked meals actually make people feel better than indulgent meals eaten at a restaurant.”

 

My Take

The Year of Living Danishly gave me a lot of insight in Denmark, reportedly the happiest nation on earth.  They have very high taxes that everyone pays, but also a very high level of social welfare benefits.  This makes for very low income inequality and a low-stress life.  However, the Danish system is not transferable to other countries.  The only way the Danes make it work is their homogeneous population and their exceptionally high levels of trust.

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402. In Defense of Elitism: Why I’m Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn’t Buy This Book

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Joel Stein

Genre:    Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Humor, Economics

336 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Defense of Elitism is former TIME columnist Joel Stein’s take on America’s political culture war and a defense of the elite to which he proudly claims membership.

The night Donald Trump won the presidency, Joel Stein knew the main reason wasn’t economic anxiety or racism but that Trump was anti-elitist.  Hillary Clinton represented Wall Street, academics, policy papers, Davos, international treaties and the people who think they’re better than you. People like Joel Stein.  Trump represented something far more appealing, which was beating up people like Joel Stein.  To find out how this shift happened and what can be done, Stein spends a week in Roberts County, Texas, which had the highest percentage of Trump voters in the country. He also goes to the home of Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams who predicted Trump’s win.

Quotes 

“More than 90 percent of whites with postgraduate degrees who voted for Hillary Clinton believe it’s “racist for a white person to want less immigration to help maintain the white share of the population,” while only 45 percent of minority voters feel that way. More than 80 percent of white people who voted for Hillary Clinton think diversity makes America stronger, while only 54 percent of black voters agree.”

 

My Take

In Defense of Elitism was an entertaining read.  Joel Stein is a witty writer and I found myself chuckling throughout this book.  Also, to his credit, Stein does not look down on the Trump supporters he meets in Roberts County, Texas.  To the contrary, he seems genuinely touched by their good will and continued prayers for him.

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