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559. One by One

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Ruth Ware

Genre:   Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Crime, Mystery, Foreign

372 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   Audio Book

Summary

Getting snowed in at a mountain chalet in the Swiss Alps is just the beginning of the problems facing the membes of the tech company Snoops who are there for a corporate retreat to decide whether or not to take a huge buyout offer.  Bigger problems ensue for them and the two Chalet employees when the murders start, one by one.

Quotes 

“I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence–the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.”

 

“They are arrogant, that’s what I realize–maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them–just like I used to do.”

 

“Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.”

 

 “Behind him is a girl with fluffy yellow hair that cannot possibly be her real shade. It’s the color of buttercups and the texture of dandelion fluff.”

 

 “But it’s not just her body language that sets her apart—it’s everything. She’s the only one wearing clothes that look more H&M than D&G, and though she’s not the only one w

earing glasses, the others look like they’re wearing props provided by a Hollywood studio.”

 

My Take

One by One is a crackling thriller.  I had previously read her books In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10 and had really enjoyed them.  I liked One by One even more.  It was very  suspenseful and kept me guessing throughout.  The main character and Chalet Manager Erin is also well developed and gives the reader someone to identify with and root for.

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556. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Pat Walsh

Author:   Martin Luther King, Jr.

Genre:   Non Fiction, Race, History

Summary

Stride Toward Freedom tells the story of the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott in 1955 led by Martin Luther King, Jr. that changed the trajectory of the civil rights movement.  Written by Dr. King, it includes his letters, speeches and a first hand account of the 50,000 Blacks who incorporated the  principles of nonviolence into their fight for equality.

Quotes 

“[Nonviolence] is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil.”

 

“Violence as a way of achieving racial justice is both impractical and immoral. It is impractical because it is a descending spiral ending in destruction for all. The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his understanding; it seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love.”

 

“…the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek.”

 

“There are several specific things that the church can do. First, it should try to get to the ideational roots of race hate, something that the law cannot accomplish. All race prejudice is based upon fears, suspicions, and misunderstandings, usually groundless. The church can be of immeasurable help in giving the popular mind direction here. Through its channels of religious education, the church can point out the irrationality of these beliefs. It can show that the idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence. It can show that Negroes are not innately inferior in academic, health, and moral standards. It can show that, when given equal opportunities, Negroes can demonstrate equal achievement.”

 

“The mere fact that we live in the United States means that we are caught in a network of inescapable mutuality. Therefore, no American can afford to be apathetic about the problem of racial justice. It is a problem that meets every man at his front door. The racial problem will be solved in America to the degree that every American considers himself personally confronted with it. Whether one lives in the heart of the Deep South or on the periphery of the North, the problem of injustice is his problem; it is his problem because it is America’s problem.”

 

“God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men, and brown men, and yellow men; God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race.”

 

“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal, a liberalism that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the Deep South. It is one thing to agree that the goal of integration is morally and legally right; it is another thing to commit oneself positively and actively to the ideal of integration—the former is intellectual assent, the latter is actual belief. These are days that demand practices to match professions. This is no day to pay lip service to integration; we must pay life service to it.”

 “Economic insecurity strangles the physical and cultural growth of its victims. Not only are millions deprived of formal education and proper health facilities but our most fundamental social unit—the family—is tortured, corrupted, and weakened by economic insufficiency. When a Negro man is inadequately paid, his wife must work to provide the simple necessities for the children. When a mother has to work she does violence to motherhood by depriving her children of her loving guidance and protection; often they are poorly cared for by others or by none—left to roam the streets unsupervised. It is not the Negro alone who is wronged by a disrupted society; many white families are in similar straits. The Negro mother leaves home to care for—and be a substitute mother for—white children, while the white mother works. In this strange irony lies the promise of future correction.”

 

 “The nonviolent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.”

 

“Since crime often grows out of a sense of futility and despair, Negro parents must be urged to give their children the love, attention, and sense of belonging that a segregated society deprives them of.”

 

“Casualties of war keep alive post war hate.”

 

“During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.”

 

“The accusation is made without reference to the true nature of the situation. Environmental problems of delinquency are interpreted as evidence of racial criminality. Crises arising in Northern schools are interpreted as proofs that Negroes are inherently delinquent. The extremists do not recognize that these school problems are symptoms of urban dislocation, rather than expressions of racial deficiency. Criminality and delinquency are not racial; poverty and ignorance breed crime whatever the racial group may be.”

 

“Many white men fear retaliation. The job of the Negro is to show them that they have nothing to fear, that the Negro understands and forgives and is ready to forget the past. He must convince the white man that all he seeks is justice, for both himself and the white man.”

 

“After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.”

 

 “Even where the polls are open to all, Negroes have shown themselves too slow to exercise their voting privileges. There must be a concerted effort on the part of Negro leaders to arouse their people from their apathetic indifference to this obligation of citizenship. In the past, apathy was a moral failure. Today, it is a form of moral and political suicide.”

 

“As he continued, one could see obvious disappointment on the faces of the white committee members. By trying to convince the Negroes that I was the main obstacle to a solution they had hoped to divide us among ourselves. But Ralph’s statement left no doubt. From this moment on the white group saw the futility of attempting to negotiate us into a compromise.”

 

“Many of them had predicted violence, and such predictions are always a conscious or unconscious invitation to action. When people, especially in public office, talk about bloodshed as a concomitant of integration, they stir and arouse the hoodlums to acts of destruction, and often work under cover to bring them about. In Montgomery several public officials had predicted violence, and violence there had to be if they were to save face.”

 

“I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.”

 

“Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for “the least of these.”

 

“One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually.”

 

“The American racial revolution has been a revolution to “get in” rather than to overthrow. We want a share in the American economy, the housing market, the educational system and the social opportunities. This goal itself indicates that a social change in America must be nonviolent. If one is in search of a better job, it does not help to burn down, the factory. If one needs more adequate education, shooting the principal will not help. If housing is the goal, only building and construction will produce that end. To destroy anything, person or property, cannot bring us closer to the goal that we seek.”

 

“It seems to me that this is the method that must guide the actions of the Negro in the present crisis in race relations. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system. The Negro must work passionately and unrelentingly for full stature as a citizen, but he must not use inferior methods to gain it. He must never come to terms with falsehood, malice, hate, or destruction.”

 

“…Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people, or any qualities people possess. It begins by loving others for their sakes. It is an entirely ‘neighbor-regarding concern for others,’ which discovers the neighbor in every man it meets. Therefore, Agape makes no distinction between friend and enemy; it is directed toward both. If one loves an individual merely on account of his friendliness, he loves him for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution.”

 

My Take

While a short book, Strive Toward Freedom packs a lot of punch.  I learned a lot about the Montgomery bus boycott and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s moral philosophy, strategy and tactics.  I came away with an increased respect (from an already high level) for this extraordinary man and the movement he championed.

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548. The Guest List

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Lucy Foley

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense, Crime

330 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

The characters in The Guest List are referred to as the bride, the plus one, the best man, the wedding planner, and the bridesmaid.  They are all gathered on a small island off the coast of Ireland to attend the wedding of Will, a gorgeous reality TV star, and Julia, the publisher of a successful lifestyle website.  Everything is picture perfect until things start going wrong, very wrong.

Quotes 

“In my experience, those who have the greatest respect for the rules also take the most enjoyment in breaking them.”

 

“And I’m not worried about it being haunted. I have my own ghosts. I carry them with me wherever I go.”

 

“The rage is growing inside me, overtaking the shock and grief. I can feel it blossoming up behind my ribs. It’s almost a relief, how it obliterates every other feeling in its path.”

 

“Marriage is about finding that person you know best in the world. Not how they take their coffee or what their favourite film is or the name of their first cat. It’s knowing on a deeper level. It’s knowing their soul.”

 

“It’s always better to get it out in the open – even if it seems shameful, even if you feel like people won’t understand.”

 

“Nowhere on earth could possibly live up to those halcyon days. But that’s nostalgia for you, the tyranny of those memories of childhood that feel so golden, so perfect.”

 

“But it’s all about the moment, a wedding. All about the day. It’s not really about the marriage at all, in spite of what everyone says.”

 

“When he broke up with me, he told me that he would love me forever. But that’s total crap. If you love someone, really, you don’t do anything to hurt them.”

 

“You don’t get this. This isn’t your moment. You didn’t create it. I created it in spite of you.”

 

“…Life is messy. We all know this. Terrible things happen, I learned that while I was still a child. But no matter what happens, life is only a series of days. You can’t control more than a single day. But you can control one of them.  Twenty-four hours can be curated.”

 

“If I didn’t pay attention, one of those currents could grow into a huge riptide, destroying all my careful planning. And here’s another thing I’ve learned – sometimes the smallest currents are the strongest.”

 

“There’s another self that I sometimes feel I lost along the way. The girl who always stayed for one more drink, who loved a dance. I miss her, sometimes.”

 

“When I step outside the sun is just beginning to go down, spilling fire upon water. It tinges pink the mist that has begun to gather over the bog, that shields its secrets. This is my favourite hour.”

 

“I’m not interested in fashion for its own sake, but I respect the power of clothes, in creating the right optics.”

 

“But I wasn’t about to complain; we could never have afforded a florist of our choice. I wonder what it must be like to have the money to do exactly what you want.”

 

My Take

Since I listened to the audio version of The Guest List (a format I highly recommend with great voice work by mulitiple actors), I can’t technically call it a page turner.  However, I had a tough time stopping the playback as I really wanted to see what happened next.  Foley knows how to create suspense and tension and uses this skill to great effect.  With the beautiful, but eerie, setting of a small island with an old castle, The Guest List would make for a great film.  I hope to see it made.

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544. The Midnight Library

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Matt Haig

Genre:  Fiction

288 pages, published September 29, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

After contemplating ending her life, protagonist Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library with her former school librarian Mrs. Elm.  In this supernatural place where the bookshelves go on forever, Nora can pick a book which represents a different version of a life that she did not lead and is then inserted into that life.  A chance to undo her regrets.  Nora tries out mulitiple different possible lives and arrives at a surprising realization.

Quotes 

“It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga.  It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do the people we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have.  It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out.  But it is not lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.  We can’t tell if any of those other versions would of been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on.”

 

“If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise.”

 

“The only way to learn is to live.”

 

“A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.”

 

 “We only need to be one person.  We only need to feel one existence.  We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility.”

 

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

 

“Never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

 “Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”

 

“You’re overthinking it.’ ‘I have anxiety. I have no other type of thinking available.”

 

“Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.”

 

“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.  She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland.

She could plant a forest inside herself.”

 

“Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.”

 

“And even if you were a pawn – maybe we all are – then you should remember that a pawn is the most magical piece of all. It might look small and ordinary but it isn’t. because a pawn is never just a pawn. A pawn is a queen-in-waiting. All you need to do is find a way to keep moving forward. One square after another. And you can get to the other side and unlock all kinds of power.”

 

“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”

 

“You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently.”

 

“Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself.”

 

“Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquitoe bites. They itch forever.”

 

“Look at that chessboard we put back in place,’ said Mrs. Elm softly. ‘Look at how ordered and safe and peaceful it looks now, before a game starts. It’s a beautiful thing. But it is boring. It is dead. And yet the moment you make a move on that board, things change. Things begin to get more chaotic. And that chaos builds with every single move you make.’

 

‘It’s an easy game to play,’ she told Nora. ‘But a hard one to master. Every move you make opens a whole new world of possibilities…In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living…never underestimate the big importance of small things.”

 

“That was how she had felt most of her life.

Caught in the middle. Struggling, flailing, just trying to survive while not knowing which way to go. Which path to commit to without regret.”

 

“It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.”

 

“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature…solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.”

 

“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.

[…]

There are patterns of life… Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of the particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.”

 

“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”

 

“Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all.”

 

“She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.”

 

“Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.”

 

“When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.”

 

My Take

The Midnight Library was a true pleasure to read (or rather listen to, in my case, with superb narration by Carey Mulligan). Author Matt Haig weaves a compelling tale of what could have been when Nora Seed is given the opportunity to explore many of the lives she could have lived, much in the same vein as George Bailey seeing how the lives around him would have been impacted if he had never been born in my favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  This book will really get you thinking, appreciating your own life and may even spur you on to take some risks.  Highly recommended.

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536. Humankind: A Hopeful History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Rutger Bregman

Genre:  Non Fiction, Science, Politics, Philosophy, Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, Public Policy

462 pages, published June 2, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

In Humankind, author Rutger Bregman rejects the widely accepted idea that human beings are by nature selfish and self-interested and instead presents and supports his thesis that the innate goodness and cooperation of human beings has been the key factor to their success.  After giving the reader a 200,000 year history, Bregman demonstrates that we are evolutionarily adapted for cooperation rather than competition, and that our instinct to trust each other has a firm evolutionary basis going back to the beginning of Homo sapiens.  He also debunks commonly believed understandings of the Milgram electrical-shock experiment, the Zimbardo prison experiment, the Kitty Genovese “bystander effect,” and shows that a real life shipwreck of boys on a remote island resulted in cooperation and teamwork rather than a Lord of the Flies style degeneration.

Quotes 

“So what is this radical idea? That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

 

“Imagine for a moment that a new drug comes on the market. It’s super-addictive, and in no time everyone’s hooked. Scientists investigate and soon conclude that the drug causes, I quote, ‘a misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, and desensitization’……That drug is the news.”

 

“Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies—think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes.”

 

“An old man says to his grandson: ‘There’s a fight going on inside me. It’s a terrible fight between two wolves. One is evil–angry, greedy, jealous, arrogant, and cowardly. The other is good–peaceful, loving, modest, generous, honest, and trustworthy. These two wolves are also fighting within you, and inside every other person too.’ After a moment, the boy asks, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The old man smiles. ‘The one you feed.’

 

“Over the last several decades, extreme poverty, victims of war, child mortality, crime, famine, child labour, deaths in natural disasters and the number of plane crashes have all plummeted. We’re living in the richest, safest, healthiest era ever. So why don’t we realise this? It’s simple. Because the news is about the exceptional, and the more exceptional an event is – be it a terrorist attack, violent uprising, or natural disaster – the bigger its newsworthiness.”

 

“It’s when crisis hits – when the bombs fall or the floodwaters rise – that we humans become our best selves.”

 

“Civilisation has become synonymous with peace and progress, and wilderness with war and decline. In reality, for most of human existence, it was the other way around.”

 

“If you are to punish a man retributively you must injure him. If you are to reform him you must improve him. And men are not improved by injuries.’ George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)”

 

“Also taboo among hunter-gatherers was stockpiling and hoarding. For most of our history we didn’t collect things, but friendships. This never failed to amaze European explorers, who expressed incredulity at the generosity of the peoples they encountered. ‘When you ask for something they have, they never say no,’ Columbus wrote in his log. ‘To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone.”

 

“News is to the mind what sugar is to the body.”

 

 “For centuries, even millennia, generals and governors, artists and poets had taken it for granted that soldiers fight. That if there’s one thing that brings out the hunter in us, it’s war. War is when we humans get to do what we’re so good at. War is when we shoot to kill. But as Colonel Samuel Marshall continued to interview groups of servicemen, in the Pacific and later in the European theatre, he found that only 15 to 25 per cent of them had actually fired their weapons. At the critical moment, the vast majority balked. One frustrated officer related how he had gone up and down the lines yelling, ‘Goddammit! Start shooting!’ Yet, ‘they fired only while I watched them or while some other officer stood over them’.14 The situation on Makin that night had been do-or-die, when you would expect everyone to fight for their lives. But in his battalion of more than three hundred soldiers, Marshall could identify only thirty-six who actually pulled the trigger. Was it a lack of experience? Nope. There didn’t seem to be any difference between new recruits and experienced pros when it came to willingness to shoot. And many of the men who didn’t fire had been crack shots in training. Maybe they just chickened out? Hardly. Soldiers who didn’t fire stayed at their posts, which meant they ran as much of a risk. To a man, they were courageous, loyal patriots, prepared to sacrifice their lives for their comrades. And yet, when it came down to it, they shirked their duty. They failed to shoot.”

 

 “To understand where things went wrong, we have to go back 15,000 years, to the end of the last ice age. Up until then, the planet had been sparsely populated and people banded together to stave off the cold. Rather than a struggle for survival, it was a snuggle for survival, in which we kept each other warm.22 Then the climate changed, turning the area between the Nile in the west and the Tigris in the east into a land of milk and honey. Here, survival no longer depended on banding together against the elements. With food in such plentiful supply, it made sense to stay put.  Huts and temples were built, towns and villages took shape and the population grew.  More importantly, people’s possessions grew. What was it Rousseau had to say about this? ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine”’–that’s where it all started to go wrong. It couldn’t have been easy to convince people that land or animals–or even other human beings–could now belong to someone. After all, foragers had shared just about everything.24 And this new practice of ownership meant inequality started to grow. When someone died, their possessions even got passed on to the next generation. Once this kind of inheritance came into play, the gap between rich and poor opened wide.”

 

“Reading through the 1300 pages of interviews … it’s patently obvious that Eichman was no brainless bureaucrat, He was a fanatic. He acted not out of indifference, but out of conviction. Like [Stanley] Milgram’s experimental subjects, he did evil because he believed he was doing good.”

 

“The emergence of the first large settlements triggered a seismic shift in religious life. Seeking to explain the catastrophes suddenly befalling us, we began to believe in vengeful and omnipotent beings, in gods who were enraged because of something we’d done. A whole clerical class was put in charge of figuring out why the gods were so angry. Had we eaten something forbidden? Said something wrong? Had an illicit thought?37 For the first time in history, we developed a notion of sin. And we began looking to priests to prescribe how we should do penance. Sometimes it was enough to pray or complete a strict set of rituals, but often we had to sacrifice cherished possessions–food or animals or even people.”

 

 “In the very same years that Rousseau was writing his books, Franklin admitted that ‘No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.’  He described how ‘civilised’ white men and women who were captured and subsequently released by Indians invariably would ‘take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods’. Colonists fled into the wilderness by the hundreds, whereas the reverse rarely happened.  And who could blame them? Living as Indians, they enjoyed more freedoms than they did as farmers and taxpayers. For women, the appeal was even greater. ‘We could work as leisurely as we pleased,’ said a colonial woman who hid from countrymen sent to ‘rescue’ her. ‘Here, I have no master,’ another told a French diplomat. ‘I shall marry if I wish and be unmarried again when I wish. Is there a single woman as independent as I in your cities?”

 

 

 “One thing is certain: a better world doesn’t start with more empathy. If anything, empathy makes us less forgiving, because the more we identify with victims, the more we generalise about our enemies. The bright spotlight we shine on our chosen few makes us blind to the perspective of our adversaries, because everybody else falls outside our view.”

 

My Take

In the same vein as Factfulness, Abundance and It’s Better Than It Looks, I found the optimism of author Rutger Bregman in Humankind to be a hopeful and encouraging look at human nature and our future together on this planet.  A nice antidote to all the doomsayers out there.

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503. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Darla Schueth and Sue Deans

Author:   Isabel Wilkerson

Genre:   Nonfiction, History, Cultural

622 pages, published September 7, 2010

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

The Warmth of Other Suns tells the story of the decades-long migration of six million black Americans who fled Jim Crow South in search of a better life and landed in the north and western parts of the United States.  In researching the book, Wilkerson interviewed more than a thousand people, but focuses on three individuals:  Ida Mae Gladney, who in 1937 left sharecropping and prejudice in Mississippi for Chicago, where she achieved quiet blue-collar success; George Starling, who in 1945 fled Florida for Harlem, where fought for civil rights; and Robert Foster, who left Louisiana in 1953 for Los Angeles to pursue a medical career and became the personal physician to Ray Charles.  All faced discrimination and hardship but still felt that leaving the South was the right thing to do.

Quotes 

“They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.”

 

“It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.”

 

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro’s making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance…. Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are idential…. There is no help or healing in apparaising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present; and an understanding of the facts of the problem–a magnanimous understanding by both races–is the first step toward its solution.”

 

 “The measure of a man’s estimate of your strength,” he finally told them, “is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.”

 

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world, where oppressed people, whether fleeing twenty-first-century Darfur or nineteenth-century Ireland, go great distances, journey across rivers, desserts, and oceans or as far as it takes to reach safety with the hope that life will be better wherever they land.”

 

 “Over the decades, perhaps the wrong questions have been asked about the Great Migration. Perhaps it is not a question of whether the migrants brought good or ill to the cities they fled to or were pushed or pulled to their destinations, but a question of how they summoned the courage to leave in the first place or how they found the will to press beyond the forces against them and the faith in a country that had rejected them for so long. By their actions, they did not cream the American Dream, they willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing. They did not ask to be accepted but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized but that they had always been deep within their hearts.”

 

 “Jim Crow had a way of turning everyone against one another, not just white against black or landed against lowly, but poor against poorer and black against black for an extra scrap of privilege.”

 

“The revolution had come too late for him. He was in his midforties when the Civil Rights Act was signed and close to fifty when its effects were truly felt. He did not begrudge the younger generation their opportunities. He only wished that more of them, his own children, in particular, recognized their good fortune, the price that had been paid for it, and made the most of it. He was proud to have lived to see the change take place.  He wasn’t judging anyone and accepted the fact that history had come too late for him to make much use of all the things that were now opening up. But he couldn’t understand why some of the young people couldn’t see it. Maybe you had to live through the worst of times to recognize the best of times when they came to you. Maybe that was just the way it was with people.”

 

 “Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself. Some spoke of specific and certain evils. Some lived in tight-lipped and cheerful denial. Others simply had no desire to relive what they had already left. The facts of their lives unfurled over the generations like an over-wrapped present, a secret told in syllables. Sometimes the migrants dropped puzzle pieces from the past while folding the laundry or stirring the corn bread, and the children would listen between cereal commercials and not truly understand until they grew up and had children and troubles of their own. And the ones who had half-listened would scold and kick themselves that they had not paid better attention when they had the chance.”

 

 “That’s why I preach today, Do not do spite,” he said. “Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you’re the one who pays for it.”

 

My Take

In The Warmth of Other Suns,  Pulitizer prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson thoroughly researched her seminal book on the black migration out of the Jim Crow south and is very informative about an often overlooked part of American history.  Her focus on three migrants of different socio-economic classes and their experiences helps bring the story to life and makes the experience much more relatable to the reader.

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494. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   J.K. Rowling

Genre:   Fiction, Young Adult, Fantasy

759 pages, published  July 21, 2007

Reading Format:   Audiobook

Summary

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is the final book in the classic series by JK Rowling.  The book, and the series, build to a final confrontation between Harry and Voldemort.  Only one can survive.

Quotes 

“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

 

“It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well.”

 

“Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.”

 

“Death’s got an Invisibility Cloak?” Harry interrupted again.

“So he can sneak up on people,” said Ron. “Sometimes he gets bored of running at them, flapping his arms and shrieking…”

 

“Dumbledore watched her fly away, and as her silvery glow faded he turned back to Snape, and his eyes were full of tears.

“After all this time?”

“Always,” said Snape.”

 

“He can run faster than Severus Snape confronted with shampoo.”

“Cinderella? Snow White? What’s that? An illness?”

 “Albus Severus,” Harry said quietly, so that nobody but Ginny could hear, and she was tactful enough to pretend to be waving to Rose, who was now on the train, “you were named for two headmasters of Hogwarts. One of them was a Slytherin and he was probably the bravest man I ever knew.”

 

 “There was a clatter as the basilisk fangs cascaded out of Hermione’s arms. Running at Ron, she flung them around his neck and kissed him full on the mouth. Ron threw away the fangs and broomstick he was holding and responded with such enthusiasm that he lifted Hermione off her feet.  “Is this the moment?” Harry asked weakly, and when nothing happened except that Ron and Hermione gripped each other still more firmly and swayed on the spot, he raised his voice. “OI! There’s a war going on here!”  Ron and Hermione broke apart, their arms still around each other.  “I know, mate,” said Ron, who looked as though he had recently been hit on the back of the head with a Bludger, “so it’s now or never, isn’t it?”

“Never mind that, what about the Horcrux?” Harry shouted. “D’you think you could just — just hold it in, until we’ve got the diadem?”  “Yeah — right — sorry —” said Ron, and he and Hermione set about gathering up fangs, both pink in the face.”

 

 “I’m going to keep going until I succeed — or die. Don’t think I don’t know how this might end. I’ve known it for years.”

 

 “Does it hurt?” The childish question had escaped Harry’s lips before he could stop it.

“Dying? Not at all,” said Sirius. “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.”

 

“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic. Capable of both inflicting injury, and remedying it.”

 

 “Every second he breathed, the smell of the grass, the cool air on his face, was so precious: To think that people had years and years, time to waste, so much time it dragged, and he was clinging to each second.”

 

 “Here lies Dobby, a free elf.”

 

“Snape’s patronus was a doe,’ said Harry, ‘the same as my mother’s because he loved her for nearly all of his life, from when they were children.”

 

“The last words Albus Dumbledore spoke to the pair of us?’

Harry is the best hope we have. Trust him.”

 

My Take

I read through the entire Harry Potter set with my son Nick while he was in elementary school.  It was a pleasure then and at least an equal pleasure to listen to the audio version of the books during my reading quest.  Narrator Jim Dale is masterful, creating unique and fitting voices for all of the characters.  Author J.K. Rowling finishes the series strong with rising tension, compelling character arcs and a perfect ending.  Even if you have previously read the series, I highly recommend trying out the audio version (especially if you can do so with young kids).  You will not be disappointed.

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489. Watch Me Disappear

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller

358 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Billie, Olive and Jonathan, a family that is torn apart when Mom Billie disappears while on a solo hiking trek and is presumed dead.  Olive and Jonathan are left to cope and wonder what happened.

Quotes 

“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”

 

“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

 

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”

 

“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”

 

“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”

 

“It didn’t seem fair, and then that love could fizzle,curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because, ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.”

 

My Take

I picked up Watch Me Disappear after reading and loving Janelle Brown’s taut, page turning thriller Pretty Things.  I didn’t enjoy Watch Me Disappear nearly as much and it took me a lot longer to finish than it should have, but it was still a decent read with some ideas to ponder.

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484. Station Eleven

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Emily St. John Mandel

Genre:    Fiction, Dystopia, Science Fiction

333  pages, published September 9, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Station Eleven is a dystopian novel set in the days of civilization’s collapse after a virus kills off most of the world’s population.  Author Emily St. John Mandel examines how human beings cope when almost every aspect of the world as they knew it ceases to exist.

Quotes 

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

 

“What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.”

 

“No one ever thinks they’re awful, even people who really actually are. It’s some sort of survival mechanism.”

 

“They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin.”

 

“She had never entirely let go of the notion that if she reached far enough with her thoughts she might find someone waiting, that if two people were to cast their thoughts outward at the same moment they might somehow meet in the middle.”

 

“The beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?”

 

“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”

 

“But anyway, I look around sometimes and I think – this will maybe sound weird – it’s like the corporate world’s full of ghosts. And actually, let me revise that, my parents are in academia so I’ve had front row seats for that horror show, I know academia’s no different, so maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts.”

 

 “She was thinking about the way she’d always taken for granted that the world had certain people in it, either central to her days or unseen and infrequently thought of. How without any one of these people the world is a subtly but unmistakably altered place, the dial turned just one or two degrees.”

 

“I’ve been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they’ll never truly die. I know that’s a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They’re all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we’re seen, that’s not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.”

 

“Jeevan found himself thinking about how human the city is, how human everything is. We bemoaned the impersonality of the modern world, but that was a lie, it seemed to him; it had never been impersonal at all. There had always been a massive delicate infrastructure of people, all of them working unnoticed around us, and when people stop going to work, the entire operation grinds to a halt. No one delivers fuel to the gas stations or the airports. Cars are stranded. Airplanes cannot fly. Trucks remain at their points of origin. Food never reaches the cities; grocery stores close. Businesses are locked and then looted. No one comes to work at the power plants or the substations, no one removes fallen trees from electrical lines. Jeevan was standing by the window when the lights went out.”

 

 “An incomplete list:

No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films, except rarely, except with a generator drowning out half the dialogue, and only then for the first little while until the fuel for the generators ran out, because automobile gas goes stale after two or three years. Aviation gas lasts longer, but it was difficult to come by.

No more screens shining in the half-light as people raise their phones above the crowd to take pictures of concert states. No more concert stages lit by candy-colored halogens, no more electronica, punk, electric guitars.

No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, a dog bite.

No more flight. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows, points of glimmering light; no more looking down from thirty thousand feet and imagining the lives lit up by those lights at that moment. No more airplanes, no more requests to put your tray table in its upright and locked position – but no, this wasn’t true, there were still airplanes here and there. They stood dormant on runways and in hangars. They collected snow on their wings. In the cold months, they were ideal for food storage. In summer the ones near orchards were filled with trays of fruit that dehydrated in the heat. Teenagers snuck into them to have sex. Rust blossomed and streaked.

No more countries, all borders unmanned.

No more fire departments, no more police. No more road maintenance or garbage pickup. No more spacecraft rising up from Cape Canaveral, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, from Vandenburg, Plesetsk, Tanegashima, burning paths through the atmosphere into space.

No more Internet. No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with heart icons whole or broken, plans to meet up later, pleas, complaints, desires, pictures of babies dressed as bears or peppers for Halloween. No more reading and commenting on the lives of others, and in so doing, feeling slightly less alone in the room. No more avatars.”

 

“He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.”

 

My Take

After reading and loving The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel, I was intererested to see if she had written any other books.  I discovered that Station Eleven was her breakthrough novel, so added the audio version to my library queue.  While I prefer The Glass Hotel, I did enjoy Station Eleven, especially her fascinating descriptions of how life changes after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization.

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478. The Nickel Boys

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Carl Moor

Author:   Colson Whitehead

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

213 pages, published July 16, 2019

Reading Format:  Audiobook

Summary

In 1960’s Tallahassee, a young black boy named Elwood Curtis , a black boy growing up in 1960s Tallahassee is unjustly sent to an infamous juvenile reformatory called the Nickel Academy.  Struggling to survive, naïve and innocent Elwood becomes friends with a fellow Nickel boy named Turner who is street smart, a schemer and a survivor.  Based on the real story of a reform school that operated for 111 years and ruined the lives of thousands of children.

Quotes 

“We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness.”

 

“Make a career of humanity. Make it a central part of your life.”

 

“The boys could have been many things had they not been ruined by that place. Doctors who cured diseases or perform brain surgery, inventing shit that saves lives. Run for president. All those lost geniuses – sure not all of them were geniuses, Chickie Pete for example was not solving special relativity – but they had been denied even the simple pleasure of being ordinary. Hobbled and handicapped before the race even began, never figuring out how to be normal.”

 

“He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

 

“You can change the law but you can’t change people and how they treat each other.”

 

“If everyone looked the other way, then everybody was in on it. If he looked the other way, he was as implicated as the rest. That’s how he saw it, how he’d always seen things.”

 

“If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.”

 

“Perhaps his life might have veered elsewhere if the US government had opened the country to colored advancement like they opened the army. But it was one thing to allow someone to kill for you and another to let him live next door.”

 

“It was easy to root for the winners. No, he liked the punch-drunk ones, half walking at mile twenty-three, tongues flapping like Labradors. Tumbling across the finish line by hook or by crook, feet pounded to bloody meat in their Nikes. The laggards and limpers who weren’t running the course but running deep into their character—down into the cave to return to the light with what they found. By the time they got to Columbus Circle, the TV crews have split, the cone cups of water and Gatorade litter the course like daisies in a pasture, and the silver space blankets twist in the wind. Maybe they had someone waiting for them and maybe they didn’t. Who wouldn’t celebrate that?”

 

“The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still he heard those higher imperatives: Love and that love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change. He never listened, never saw what was plainly in front of him, and now he had been plucked from the world altogether.”

 

“To forbid the thought of escape, even that slightest butterfly thought of escape, was to murder one’s humanity.”

 

“Throw us in jail, and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities after midnight hours, and drag us out onto some wayside road, and beat us and leave us half-dead, and we will still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, a book about blacks escaping slavery, and found it to be an interesting, but depressing book.  While The Nickel Boys is very similar, a depressing account of the inhumanity suffered by young black man, it is tighter and more engaging.

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