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446. An Object of Beauty

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Steve Martin

Genre:   Fiction, Art

304 pages, published November 23, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Lacey Yeager is an attractive, ambitious young woman who comes to New York to make her way in the art world during its heyday from the late 1990s through today.  Starting out at Sotheby’s, she climbs the social and career ladders with ease, finally opening her own gallery.

Quotes 

“When someone less capable is ahead of me, I am not pleased. It makes me insane.”

 

“Lacey was just as happy alone as with company. When she was alone, she was potential; with others she was realized. Alone, she was self-contained, her tightly spinning magnetic energy oscillating around her. When in company, she had invisible tethers to anyone in the room: as they moved away, she pulled them in.”

 

“I have found that– just as in real life–imagination sometimes has to stand in for experience.”

 

“You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.”

 

“…when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable…”

 

“she is nearing forty and not so easily forgiven as when her skin bloomed like roses.”

 

“She started converting objects of beauty into objects of value.”

 

“An artist who painted a face was now ‘playing with the idea of portraiture,’ or ‘exploring push-pull aesthetics,’ or toying with contradictions like ‘menacing-slash-playful,’ but he or she was never, ever, just painting a face.”

 

My Take

Written by iconic comedian Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty is a compelling character study of an ambitious young woman who also loves art.  I found it fascinating and learned a lot about the inner workings of New York art scene and how the market for art operates.

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436. The Design of Everyday Things

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Donald A. Norman

Genre:   Non Fiction, Business, Psychology, Design

240 pages, published September 19, 2002

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Design of Everyday Things is about how the design of objects and systems can help or hinder users.  Author Donald Norman explores how bad design can be avoided and the desirability of good design.

Quotes 

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”

 

“When people fail to follow these bizarre, secret rules, and the machine does the wrong thing, its operators are blamed for not understanding the machine, for not following its rigid specifications. With everyday objects, the result is frustration. With complex devices and commercial and industrial processes, the resulting difficulties can lead to accidents, injuries, and even deaths. It is time to reverse the situation: to cast the blame upon the machines and their design. It is the machine and its design that are at fault. It is the duty of machines and those who design them to understand people. It is not our duty to understand the arbitrary, meaningless dictates of machines.”

 

“Principles of design:

  1. Use both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head.
  2. Simplify the structure of tasks.
  3. Make things visible: bridge gulfs between Execution and Evaluation.
  4. Get the mappings right.
  5. Exploit the power of constraints.
  6. Design for error.
  7. When all else fails, standardize.”

 

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible,”

 

“Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.”

 

“A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.”

 

“Fail often, fail fast,”

 

“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itself. Bad design, on the other hand, screams out its inadequacies, making itself very noticeable.”

 

“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.”

 

“The vicious cycle starts: if you fail at something, you think it is your fault. Therefore you think you can’t do that task. As a result, next time you have to do the task, you believe you can’t, so you don’t even try. The result is that you can’t, just as you thought.”

 

“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves. Unfortunately, the idea that a person is at fault is imbedded in the legal system. When major accidents occur, official courts of inquiry are set up to assess the blame. More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised. The law rests comfortably. But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature. System design should take this into account. Pinning the blame on the person may be a comfortable way to proceed, but why was the system ever designed so that a single act by a single person could cause calamity? Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”

 

“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”

 

“It is easy to design devices that work well when everything goes as planned. The hard and necessary part of design is to make things work well even when things do not go as planned.”

 

“A story tells of Henry Ford’s buying scrapped Ford cars and having his engineers disassemble them to see which parts failed and which were still in good shape. Engineers assumed this was done to find the weak parts and make them stronger. Nope. Ford explained that he wanted to find the parts that were still in good shape. The company could save money if they redesigned these parts to fail at the same time as the others.”

 

“Norman’s Law: The day the product team is announced, it is behind schedule and over its budget.”

 

“Poor feedback can be worse than no feedback at all, because it is distracting, uninformative, and in many cases irritating and anxiety-provoking.”

 

“original ideas are the easy part. Actually producing the idea as a successful product is what is hard.”

 

“If designers and researchers do not sometimes fail, it is a sign that they are not trying hard enough—they are not thinking the great creative thoughts that will provide breakthroughs in how we do things. It is possible to avoid failure, to always be safe. But that is also the route to a dull, uninteresting life.”

 

“Cognition and emotion cannot be separated. Cognitive thoughts lead to emotions: emotions drive cognitive thoughts. The brain is structured to act upon the world, and every action carries with it expectations, and these expectations drive emotions. That is why much of language is based on physical metaphors, why the body and its interaction with the environment are essential components of human thought. Emotion is highly underrated. In fact, the emotional system is a powerful information processing system that works in tandem with cognition. Cognition attempts to make sense of the world: emotion assigns value. It is the emotional system that determines whether a situation is safe or threatening, whether something that is happening is good or bad, desirable or not. Cognition provides understanding: emotion provides value judgments. A human without a working emotional system has difficulty making choices. A human without a cognitive system is dysfunctional.”

 

My Take

While there are some interesting ideas in The Design of Everyday Things (as exemplified by the quotes above), I found the book to be dated with lots of discussion of computer and phone systems that are no longer relevant in 2020.  2002, when this book was published, is an eternity in the world of technology.

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427. The Giver of Stars

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Aileen Schwab, Katy Fasset

Author:   Jojo Moyes

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

400 pages, published October 8, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Set in the Depression, The Giver of Stars is the story of five women who become the Packhorse Librarians, delivering library books to the residents of rural Kentucky and changing lives (their own and others) in the process.  The main character is Alice Wright, a beautiful young British woman who marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her provincial English life.  Alice is befriended by Margery, a rugged, self-sufficient woman who advises Alice who advises Alice that “there is always a way out of a situation” when Alice’s marriage becomes interminable.  So when a call goes out for a team of women to deliver books as part of Eleanor Roosevelt’s new traveling library, Alice signs on enthusiastically.

Quotes 

“There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth had gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.”

 

“She just wasn’t sure she had yet been to the place she was homesick for.”

 

“That some things are a gift, even if you don’t get to keep them.”

 

“You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?” Margery said finally. “Ain’t the hurt. It’s that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it doesn’t matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them period. It’s when you realize they can always shut you up with a fist. Just like that.” She mulled over it for a Monet, then straightened up , and flashed Alice a tight smile. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”

 

“There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham. • ANNA SEWELL, Black Beauty”

 

“Time flew. And each ended the night full and happy with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else. And that there might just be someone out there, who will only ever see the best in you.”

 

“he makes my heart flutter like a clean sheet on a long line.”

 

“And there followed a strange, elongated couple of minutes. The kind in which two people know they have to part, and don’t want to.And while neither can acknowledge it, each believes the other feels it too.”

 

“She had earned every one of her bruises and blisters, had built a new Alice over the frame of one with whom she had never felt entirely comfortable.”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed The Giver of Stars, another great book by Jojo Moyes.  Previous books by Moyes, a talented and entertaining writer, that I have read on my Quest include  After You, One Plus On, The Girl You Left Behind, Silver Bay, Still Me and Paris for One.  A foray into historical fiction, The Giver of Stars is one of Moyes’ best books.  The characters are interesting, well detailed and come to life, especially in the audio version that I listened to, and the plot definitely holds your interest.  Highly recommended.

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424. Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Katy Fassett

Author:    Amaryllis Fox

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

240 pages, published October 15, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Life Undercover: Coming of Age in the CIA is the memoir of Amaryllis Fox who writes about her life  as a young woman in the CIA.   Fox was an undergraduate at Oxford studying theology and international law when her writing mentor Daniel Pearl was captured and beheaded.  Roused by this horrific event, Fox applied to a master’s program in conflict and terrorism at Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service, where she created an algorithm that predicted the likelihood of a terrorist cell arising in any village around the world.  At the tender age of 21, Fox was recruited by the CIA where she went from analyzing hundreds of classified cables a day to help prepare the daily briefing for the president. She then worked on the Iraq desk in the Counterterrorism center. At twenty-two, she was fast-tracked into advanced operations training and then deployed as a spy under non-official cover as an art dealer specializing in tribal and indigenous art and sent to infiltrate terrorist networks in remote areas of the Middle East and Asia.

Quotes 

 

My Take

Life Undercover is a quick read.  I learned a lot about the CIA training and covert operations.  Fox is a good writer and has some interesting tales to tell about her live undercover and how she got there.

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422. The Bluest Eye

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marlys Lietz

Author:   Toni Morrison

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

216 pages, published September 6, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel and tells the story of 11 year old Pecola Breedlove.  Pecola, a poor black child from a dysfunctional family, prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as the blond, blue-eyed children in her town.

Quotes 

“Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.”

 

“We mistook violence for passion, indolence for leisure, and thought recklessness was freedom.”

 

“And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

“guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness.”

 

“Anger is better.  There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.”

 

“Jealousy we understood and thought natural… But envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.”

 

“She left me the way people leave a hotel room. A hotel room is a place to be when you are doing something else. Of itself it is of no consequence to one’s major scheme. A hotel room is convenient. But its convenience is limited to the time you need it while you are in that particular town on that particular business; you hope it is comfortable, but prefer, rather, that it be anoymous. It is not, after all, where you live.”

 

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us–all who knew her–felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used–to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.  And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the Word.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, The Bluest Eye.  While it is well written and has something to say, I found it hard to relate to the characters and was not very engaged in the story.  Also, it is depressing.

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420. Midnight Sun

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Jo Nesbø

Genre:   Fiction, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

273 pages, published February 16, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Midnight Sun tells the story of Jon, a hitman for Oslo’s biggest crime lord The Fisherman, who is on the run after he betrays his boss.  Jon flees to a small, isolated town in the mountains of Norway that is so far north the sun never sets.  While seeking sanctuary from a local religious sect, Jon falls in love with Lea, a bereaved mother and her young son, Knut.

However, the Fisherman’s men are closing in.

Quotes 

“I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves. They didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key–salvation–was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (“Paradise?”).”

 

“You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside. You’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.”

 

“I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.”

 

“He rubbed his chin. “Then you have to believe that living as a Christian is in itself good. That renunciation, not succumbing to sin, has a value for human beings even in this earthly life. On a similar theme, I’ve read that sportsmen find the pain and effort of training meaningful in itself, even if they never win anything. If heaven didn’t actually exist, then at least we have a good, secure life as Christians, where we work, live happily, accept the possibilities God and nature give us, and look after each other. Do you know what my father—also a preacher—used to say about Læstadianism? That if you only counted the people the movement had saved from alcoholism and broken homes, that alone would justify what we do, even if we were preaching a lie.” He paused for a minute. “But it’s not always like that. Sometimes it costs more than it should to live according to Scripture. The way it did for Lea…The way I, in my delusion, forced Lea to live.” There was a faint tremor in his voice. “It took me many years to realise it, but no one should be forced by their father to live in a marriage like that, with a man they hate, a man who had taken them by force.” He raised his head and looked at the crucifix above us. “Yes, I remain convinced that it was right according to Scripture, but sometimes salvation can have too high a price.”

 

“He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.”

 

My Take

I had previously read The Snowman by Jo Nesbø and really enjoyed it.  So I thought I would give Midnight Sun a read.  Okay, but not nearly as good.  I recommend skipping it.

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413. Daisy Jones & The Six

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee

Author:   Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction, Music

355 pages, published March 5, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Daisy Jones & The Six is a fictional account of a band whose album Aurora came to define the late seventies rock ‘n’ roll era.   Led by the brooding Billy Dunne and headlined by the adventuresome and reckless Daisy, the band briefly have their moment in the sun but come crashing to earth when internal tensions prove to much to overcome.

Quotes 

“I had absolutely no interest in being somebody else’s muse.

I am not a muse.

I am the somebody.

End of fucking story.”

 

“I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was like me. I don’t believe in soul mates anymore and I’m not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I’d believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn’t, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who’s suffering from the same stuff you are.”

 

“She had written something that felt like I could have written it, except I knew I couldn’t have. I wouldn’t have come up with something like that. Which is what we all want from art, isn’t it? When someone pins down something that feels like it lives inside us? Takes a piece of your heart out and shows it to you? It’s like they are introducing you to a part of yourself.”

 

“Men often think they deserve a sticker for treating women like people.”

 

“You have these lines you won’t cross. But then you cross them. And suddenly you possess the very dangerous information that you can break the rule and the world won’t instantly come to an end. You’ve taken a big, black, bold line and you’ve made it a little bit gray. And now every time you cross it again, it just gets grayer and grayer until one day you look around and you think, There was a line here once, I think.”

 

“I think you have to have faith in people before they earn it. Otherwise it’s not faith, right?”

 

“You can justify anything. If you’re narcissistic enough to believe that the universe conspires for and against you—which we all are, deep down—then you can convince yourself you’re getting signs about anything and everything.”

 

“Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.”

 

“But knowing you’re good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself.”

 

“But loving somebody isn’t perfection and good times and laughing and making love. Love is forgiveness and patience and faith and every once in a while, it’s a gut punch. That’s why it’s a dangerous thing, when you go loving the wrong person. When you love somebody who doesn’t deserve it. You have to be with someone that deserves your faith and you have to be deserving of someone else’s. It’s sacred.”

 

“Passion is…it’s fire. And fire is great, man. But we’re made of water. Water is how we keep living. Water is what we need to survive.”

 

“You can’t control another person. It doesn’t matter how much you love them. You can’t love someone back to health and you can’t hate someone back to health and no matter how right you are about something, it doesn’t mean they will change their mind.”

 

“Love and pride don’t mix.”

 

“But at some point, you have to recognize that you have no control over anybody and you have to step back and be ready to catch them when they fall and that’s all you can do. It feels like throwing yourself to sea. Or, maybe not that. Maybe it’s more like throwing someone you love out to sea and then praying they float on their own, knowing they might well drown and you’ll have to watch.”

 

“I believe you can break me

But I’m saved for the one who saved me

We only look like young stars

Because you can’t see old scars”

 

“It is what I have always loved about music. Not the sounds or the crowds or the good times as much as the words — the emotions, the stories, the truth — that you can let flow right out of your mouth.

 

“I wish someone had told me that love isn’t torture. Because I thought love was this thing that was supposed to tear you in two and leave you heartbroken and make your heart race in the worst way. I thought love was bombs and tears and blood. I did not know that it was supposed to make you lighter, not heavier. I didn’t know it was supposed to take only the kind of work that makes you softer. I thought love was war. I didn’t know it was supposed to… I didn’t know it was supposed to be peace.”

 

“It’s funny. At first, I think you start getting high to dull your emotions, to escape from them. But after a while you realize that the drugs are what are making your life untenable, they are actually what are heightening every emotion you have. It’s making your heartbreak harder, your good times higher. So coming down really does start to feel like rediscovering sanity. And when you rediscover your sanity, it’s only a matter of time before you start to get an inkling of why you wanted to escape it in the first place.”

 

“It scared me that the only thing between this moment of calm and the biggest tragedy of my life was me choosing not to do it.”

 

“I’m not perfect. I’ll never be perfect. I don’t expect anything to be perfect. But things don’t have to be perfect to be strong. So if you’re waiting around, hoping that something’s going to crack, I just… I have to tell you it’s not gonna be me. And I can’t let it be Billy. Which means it’s gonna be you.”

 

“When people asked me for my autograph, I used to write, “Stay Solid, Daisy J.” But when it was a young girl – which wasn’t often but it did happen from time to time – I used to write, “Dream big, little bird. Love, Daisy”

 

“If I’ve given the impression that trust is easy – with your spouse, with your kids, with anybody you care about – if I’ve made it seem like it’s easy to do….then I’ve misspoken. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. But you have nothing without it. Nothing meaningful at all. That’s why I chose to do it. Over and over and over. Even when it bit me in the ass. And I will keep choosing it until the day I die”

 

My Take

I really enjoyed Daisy Jones & The Six, especially the audio version which has multiple narrators who do a terrific job bringing this story of a 70’s rock band to vibrant life.  Listening to it, I really felt like I was there as the band went on a wild ride that burned bright but ultimately led to their dissolution.  The book also has a lot of interesting things to say about love, trust, soul mates and the creative process.  Highly recommended.

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411. The Deserter

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:    Nelson DeMille

Genre:   Fiction, Thriller, Mystery, Suspense

448 pages, published October 22, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Army Special Operator Scott Brodie and Maggie Taylor of the Criminal Investigation Division are sent in by the military to Venezuela to capture Captain Kyle Mercer of the Army’s elite Delta Force.  When Mercer disappeared from his post in Afghanistan, a video released by his Taliban captors made international headlines.  But it was unclear if Mercer deserted before he was captured.  A second video sent to Mercer’s Army commanders revealed that Mercer intentionally disappeared.

Quotes 

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

 

“He had a clean shot, but he also had an informal rule of trying not to kill anyone within an hour of landing in a new country.”

 

“The first casualty of war is the truth.”

 

“I’m always ready for anything, but prepared for nothing.”

 

My Take

The Deserter is a somewhat engaging, but a bit clichéd, thriller.  With the nonstop machismo of the main character, I think its appeal was wasted on a 54 year old woman like me.

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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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406. The Testaments

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Margaret Atwood

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Dystopia

422 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Testaments is a decades long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale by acclaimed author Margaret Atwood.   In it, Atwood continues the story of Gilead, a dystopian future country that supplants the United States of America after a far right religious sect overthrows the government.   The Testaments picks up the story more than fifteen years after Handmaid’s Tale protagonist Offred was left in limbo with the testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Quotes 

“You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.”

 

“And how easily a hand becomes a fist.”

 

“As they say, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

 

“You’d be surprised how quickly the mind goes soggy in the absence of other people. One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others. I was one person: I risked becoming no person.”

 

“The truth can cause a lot of trouble for those who are not supposed to know it.”

 

“Once a story you’ve regarded as true has turned false, you begin suspecting all stories.”

 

“The inventor of the mirror did few of us any favours: we must have been happier before we knew what we looked like.”

 

“But it can put a lot of pressure on a person to be told they need to be strong.”

 

My Take

I read Margaret Atwood’s iconic The Handmaid’s Tale over 20 years and thoroughly enjoyed her dystopian tale of a future where a fundamentalist religious cult has seized power in the United States, rechristening the country Gilead, and imposed a new social order where many women are forced to be handmaids and bear the children of the elite male ruling class.  The Testaments is a sequel to that story and also contains some of the back story, explaining how Gilead came into being and worked its will.  Like its predecessor, it is a compelling read that I couldn’t put down.

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