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549. Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Jason Riley

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Economics, Politics, Public Policy

301 pages, published May 25, 2021

Reading Format:   E-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Maverick is a biography by the Wall Street Journal’s Jason Riley of conservative economist and prolific author Thomas Sowell.  Growing up without a mother or father, barely subsisting in Harlem during his teenage years, and belatedly attending college in his late 20’s, Sowell did not have an easy path.  However, he made the most of his opportunities and forged a brilliant path, transferring from Howard to Harvard, receiving a master’s degree from Columbia and a PhD from the University of Chicago (where he studied under Milton Friedman) and then teaching at Cornell and UCLA before landing at the Hoover Institution at Stanford.  Unafraid and dedicated to empiricism, Sowell’s critiques of liberal tenets such as affirmative action has often infuriated those on the left, especially those who think of black conservatives as race traitors.  During his storied career, Sowell has published over 30 books covering topics from economic history and social inequality to political theory, race, and culture and is a National Humanities Medal recipient for innovative scholarship which incorporated history, economics and political science.

Quotes 

Having previously read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell and having seen several interviews with him, I was already aware of his intriguing, well reasoned and empirically supported ideas about economics and race.  That understanding was enhanced and deepened after reading this thoroughly engaging and well researched biography by the talented Jason Riley who I always enjoy seeing on The Journal Editorial Report.  The world has benefitted greatly from the life of Thomas Sowell and I look forward to reading more of the books in his canon.

 

My Take

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517. Van Gogh, The Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Art, Biography

976 pages, published October 18, 2011

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Hoopla

Summary

Van Gogh, The Life is an incredibly detailed, exhaustive look at the life of Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh from his birth to his early death at age 37.  We follow Vincent’s early struggles to find his place in the world, his conflicted relationship with family, including art dealer brother Theo who financially supported Vincent during most of his life, his intense relationship with fellow Impressionist Paul Gaugin, his move to Provence, where in an explosion of productivity he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art and finally to the  mental illness he combated during a significant portion of his brief life.

Quotes 

“It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.”

 

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.”

 

 “…and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?”

 

“There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”

 

“A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke”

 

“I don’t know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream.”

 

“Normality is a paved road: It’s comfortable to walk, but no flowers grow on it.”

 

“If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

 

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

 

“Close friends are truly life’s treasures. Sometimes they know us better than we know ourselves. With gentle honesty, they are there to guide and support us, to share our laughter and our tears. Their presence reminds us that we are never really alone.”

 

 “What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?”

 “If I am worth anything later, I am worth something now. For wheat is wheat, even if people think it is a grass in the beginning.”

 

“The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.”

 

“Art is to console those who are broken by life.”

 

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

 

“I try more and more to be myself, caring relatively little whether people approve or disapprove.”

 

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

 

“I want to touch people with my art. I want them to say ‘he feels deeply, he feels tenderly’.”

 

“It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.”

 

“I always think that the best way to know God is to love many things.”

 

“At present I absolutely want to paint a starry sky. It often seems to me that night is still more richly coloured than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky.”

 

 “It is looking at things for a long time that ripens you and gives you a deeper meaning.”

 

My Take

I listened to the audio version of Van Gogh, The Life in connection with a class I took on Vincent Van Gogh.  It is an extremely long book that would have benefited tremendously from editing out some of the slower and repetitive portions.  That said, I did learn A LOT about Vincent Van Gogh, who in addition to being an artistic genius was a world class narcissist and free loader.  Vincent’s letters make clear that often acted like a real jerk, expecting his brother Theo to continuously provide him with material support with no questions asked while sometimes looking down on Theo because he was a businessman and not an artist.  A unique character!

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496. The Last American Man

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Gilbert

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Nature

241 pages, published  December 23, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Elizabeth Gilbert

Genre:   Non Fiction, Biography, Nature

241 pages, published  December 23, 2009

Reading Format:   Book

Quotes 

“I live in nature where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is the planet around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and build my fire in a circle. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost site of that. I don’t live inside buildings because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in a real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they have stepped outside the natural circle of life.

 

Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in a box of their bedrooms because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into another box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken into little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to the house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box.

 

Break out of the box! This not the way humanity lived for thousands of years.”

 

“Show up for your own life, he said. Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about conciousness, so honor that consciousness.

Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with wilful oblivion. Try to notice something new everyday, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet fell like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is – your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbours, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge.”

 

“He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better everyday.”

 

“only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.”

 

 “Clever, ambitious, and always in search of greater efficiency, we Americans have, in two short centuries, created a world of push button, round the clock comfort for ourselves. The basic needs of humanity – food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, and even sexual pleasure – no longer need to be personally laboured for or ritualised or even understood. All these things are available to us now for mere cash. Or credit. Which means that nobody needs to know how to do anything any more, except the one narrow skill that will earn enough money to pay for the conveniences and services of modern living.

 

But in replacing every challenge with a short cut we seem to have lost something and Eustace isn’t the only person feeling that loss. We are an increasingly depressed and anxious people – and not for nothing. Arguably, all these modern conveniences have been adopted to save us time. But time for what? Having created a system that tends to our every need without causing us undue exertion or labour, we can now fill those hours with…?”

 

“Not making a living,’ he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, ‘just living.”

 

“We are not alien visitors to this planet, after all but natural residents and relatives of every living entity here. This earth is where we came from and where we’ll all end up when we die, and during the interim, it is our home, And there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home.”

 

“Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like, notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is – your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.”

 

“Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key question of your life: What is is that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?”

 

“Train them to pay attention to their choices. (“Reduce, Reuse and Recycle are good ideas,” he would lecture, “but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R- Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You can.”)”

 

“On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, “Damn! I have too many irons in the fire.”  Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary.”

 

 “Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a “pioneer” or a “maverick” or a “cowboy.” Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as “staking their claim” or boldly pushing themselves “beyond the frontier” or even “riding into the sunset.” We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it’s really a code now, because these guys aren’t actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media monguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

 

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he’s not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he’s talking about really killing something.”

 

“The problem was that, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and was transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There, he shed his cosmopolitan manners and became a robust and proficient man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, The Last American Man

 

“..there’s no way we can ever hope to understand ourselves if we don’t at least marginally understand our home. That is the understanding we need to put our lives in some bigger metaphysical context. Instead, Eustace sees a chilling sight- a citizenry so removed from the rhythm of nature that we march through our lives as mere sleepwalkers, blinded, deafened, and senseless. Robotically existing in sterilized surroundings that numb the mind, weaken the body, and atrophy the soul.”

 

“Over the course of the summer, he taught the children to eat foods they had never known, to sharpen and use knives, to carve their own spoons, to make knots and play Indian games and- every time they cut a branch off a living tree- to cut away a small lock of their own hair, to leave as an offering of thanks.”

 

“Where it gets tricky is our deciding what we want Eustace Conway to be, in order to fulfill our notions of him, and then ignoring what doesn’t fit into our first-impression romantic image. My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief. When I first heard of his life and his adventures, all I could think was Thank God. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there. Thank God there was one truly resourceful and independent wild soul left in this country. Because, at some deep emotional level, Eustace’s existence signified to me that somehow it’s still true, that we Americans are, against all other available evidence, a nation where people grow free and wild and strong and brave and willful, instead of lazy and fat and boring and unmotivated.”

 

My Take

I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Last American Man written by the talented writer Elizabeth Gilbert (made famous by her memoir Eat, Pray, Love).  Her subject, the anachronistic and fascinating Eustace Conway, who lives and preaches his ethos of living in complete harmony with nature seems out place in our modern, technological world.  However, his message resonated with me and made me contemplate how I live my life and the changes I could make to be more in synch with the natural world.

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491. The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s: An Oral History

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Andy Greene

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Cultural, Biography, Humor

464 pages, published  March 24, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Interspersed with quotes from the creators, writers, and actors of The Office, this book is a behind the scenes account of one of the most iconic television shows of the 2000’s.  Readers are invited behind the scenes of their favorite moments and characters. Starting with the original BBC show starring Ricky Gervais, we go through the entire nine-season run in America.

Quotes 

“We’re so divided as a nation, we’re so divided as a world, but the one thing that brings us together always is love and smiles and comedy and an outside family that makes you feel a part of it.”

 

“Even at the peak of its popularity around seasons four and five, The Office never generated ratings even comparable to sitcoms like Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory, procedural dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, or, especially, reality competition shows like American Idol and Dancing with the Stars. But bars all over America in 2019 don’t host Dancing with the Stars or NCIS trivia nights. The Big Bang Theory isn’t breaking streaming records on Netflix and teens aren’t bingeing Two and a Half Men on their phones. It’s The Office that has emerged as the most beloved sitcom of the 2000s and just gets bigger with each passing year.”

 

“The only thing that gives me an adrenaline rush is the idea. I wish I could just have the idea, watch it on telly, and not actually have to do anything.”

 

“Oscar Nunez (Oscar Martinez, Seasons 1–9): The great, great, great sitcoms of yore all had a simple premise. It’s character driven. Taxi’s just a fucking taxi place. Cheers is just a bar. That’s all it is. And we were just an office.”

 

“I saw Michael Scott as just socially desperate and yet good-hearted, which is probably how I would, in my darkest moments, describe myself. (Caroline Williams)”

 

“For me, Michael was just lonely. Loneliness is, at least for me, the most universal emotion. (Caroline Williams)”

 

 “What was so amazing about Steve was that as Michael Scott, he could make your skin crawl in one scene by being such a jerk, and such an asshole, and in the very next scene you would weep for him. You bled for the man because he was so blind to his own faults. (Randy Cordray)”

 

“A lot of my friends who have teenagers, they’ve shared with me that they watch it almost as an emotional soother. If they’re in a bad mood, they’ll just pop on The Office and they’ll binge-watch it. (Amy Ryan)”

 

“Larry Wilmore: There was a blog at the time called Television Without Pity. That was Twitter from back then. The Office got a whole section on it and people were pouring out love and opinions for The Office and the fan base really started growing during the season.”

 

My Take

I loved watching The Office when it was originally on TV (including the British version) and I love watching The Office years after it concluded on Netflix, this time with my kids who are huge fans.  It is comedy gold that stands the test of time.  This book is a well written, thorough, informative retrospective of the show and enhances subsequent viewing.

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

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben and Drue Emerson

Author:   Lindsey Fitzharris

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

304 pages, published October 31, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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474. The Yellow House

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Julie Horowitz

Author:   Sarah M. Broom

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural

376 pages, published August 13, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In The Yellow House, writer Sarah M. Broom tells the stories of her large family of twelve children that lived in and out of mother Ivory Mae’s shotgun house in New Orleans East.  Broom starts in the late 1800’s and concludes with life in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Quotes 

“Distance lends perspective, but it can also shade, misinterpret.”

 

“The mythology of New Orleans—that it is always the place for a good time; that its citizens are the happiest people alive, willing to smile, dance, cook, and entertain for you; that it is a progressive city open to whimsy and change—can sometimes suffocate the people who live and suffer under the place’s burden, burying them within layers and layers of signifiers, making it impossible to truly get at what is dysfunctional about the city.”

 

“Dresses you might wear for special occasions she wore every day. In this way she and Joseph were alike. They dressed to be seen, which is how it came to be that they built up a reputation for floor showing, as Uncle Joe calls it. “Yeah, we knew we looked good.” They danced wherever there was a floor—a bar or a ball. The sidewalk, sometimes. “We used to go in clubs and start dancing from the door. For a poor man I used to dress my can off,” he says. “That’s what used to get me in so much trouble and thing with the ladies.” He and his baby sister, Ivory, would swing it out, jitterbugging and carrying on. Ivory was always fun and always light on her feet. She was especially gifted at being led and men generally loved this quality in her.”

 

“Zora Neale Hurston said, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.”

 

“The house’s disappearance from the landscape was not different from my father’s absence. His was a sudden erasure for my mother and siblings, a prolonged and present absence for me, an intriguing story with an ever-expanding middle that never drew to a close. The house held my father inside of it, preserved; it bore his traces. As long as the house stood, containing these remnants, my father was not yet gone. And then suddenly, he was.”

 

“When the house fell down, it can be said, something in me opened up. Cracks help a house resolve internally its pressures and stresses, my engineer friend had said. Houses provide a frame that bears us up. Without that physical structure, we are the house that bears itself up. I was now the house.”

 

“For the longest time, I couldn’t bear to hear his voice. This is such a difficult thing to write, to be that close to someone who you cannot bear to look at, who you are afraid of, who you are worried will hurt you, even inadvertently, especially because you are his family and you will allow him to get away with it.”

 

“That was the story coming out of city hall, the small-print narrative on the full-page advertisements that appeared in glossy local magazines. Except none of these projections would ever come true. New Orleans would not hold steady, not in the least. The city’s population reached its apex in 1960. But no one knew that then.”

 

My Take

Winner of the 2019 National Book Award for non fiction, The Yellow House provides the reader with a unique point of view on New Orleans during the past 40 years and the lives of a large African American family that lived just outside the city in New Orleans East.  While I enjoyed the book, it was a bit meandering and verbose at times.

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423. The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s Over Germany 1944-45

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Ben Emerson

Author:    Stephen E. Ambrose

Genre:   Nonfiction, World War II, History, Biography

299 pages, published August 14, 2001

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Written by World War II military historian Stephen Ambrose, The Wild Blue tells the story of the courageous young men who flew the massive B-24 bombers over Germany during the last two years of World War II.  These missions were incredibly dangerous as the planes almost always encountered anti-aircraft fire before they dropped their bombs and the casualty rate of the pilots and crew were stratospherically high.  In addition to sections devoted to pilot training and the aircraft, the focus of the book is on George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, who served as a brave B-24 pilot stationed in Italy at the age of 22.  McGovern ultimately flew 35 missions and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Quotes 

 

My Take

I have a great interest in World War II and The Wild Blue filled in a gap in my knowledge of that subject, namely the American pilots stationed in Italy who flew missions into Germany to bomb factories and other strategic targets necessary to winning the war.  Reading about the heroism and courage of these very young men (truly the best of America) gave me an increased appreciation for the silent sacrifice of the World War II generation.  It was also very interesting to read about the back stories of the B-24 bomber, airmen training, life in Italy, the missions and the wartime home front.  An excellent book.

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390. Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Mike Brady

Author:   Ryan Holliday

Genre:    Nonfiction, Business, History, Politics, Biography

331 pages, published February 27, 2018

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Conspiracy tells the tale of Peter Theil, Paypal founder and billionaire investor, and the conspiracy he funded to exact revenge on Gawker Media.   In 2007, in a short blogpost on Valleywag, Gawker outed Peter Thiel as gay.  While Thiel’s sexuality had been known to close friends and family, he didn’t consider himself a public figure and was incensed that his privacy had been invaded.  It took almost a decade, but Thiel finally exacted his revenge.  He financed a lawsuit by Hulk Hogan who sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after they posted a videotape of him having sex with his best friend’s wife.  Hogan would end up with a $140 million dollar judgment against Gawker which had declare bankruptcy.  Only later would Thiel’s role in bringing down Gawker become public.

Quotes 

“It is always revealing to see how a person responds to those situations where he’s told: “There’s nothing you can do about it. This is the way of the world.” Peter Thiel’s friend, the mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein, has a category of individual he defines as a “high-agency person.” How do you respond when told something is impossible? Is that the end of the conversation or the start of one? What’s the reaction to being told you can’t—that no one can? One type accepts it, wallows in it even. The other questions it, fights it, rejects it.”

 

“His path was in some ways traditional—Stanford to Stanford Law to judicial clerkship to high-powered law firm—but it was also marked by bouts of rebellion. At Stanford he created and published a radical conservative journal called The Stanford Review, then he wrote a book that railed against multiculturalism and “militant homosexuals” on campus, despite being both gay and foreign born. His friends thought he might become a political pundit. Instead he became a lawyer. Then one day, surprising even himself, he walked out of one of the most prestigious securities law firms in the world, Sullivan & Cromwell, after seven months and three days on the job. Within a few short years, Thiel formed and then sold PayPal, an online payments company, to eBay for $ 1.5 billion in July 2002, the month that Nick Denton registered the domain for his first site, Gizmodo. With proceeds of some $ 55 million, Thiel assembled an empire. He retooled a hedge fund called Clarium into a vehicle to make large, counterintuitive bets on global macro trends, seeding it with $ 10 million of his own money. In 2003, Thiel registered a company called Palantir with the Securities and Exchange Commission. In 2004, he would found it in earnest. The company would take antifraud technology from PayPal and apply it to intelligence gathering—fighting terrorism, predicting crime, providing military insights. It would take money from the venture capital arm of the CIA and soon take on almost every other arm of the government as clients.”

 

“You rush in to stamp out the sparks and end up fanning them into flames. This is the risk.”

 

“For all the claims that what Peter had done was personal and unethical and wrong, that he had made the world a worse place and horribly wronged a group of journalists, something surprising happened: Media actually did change. Because they knew they needed to.”

 

“The Count of Monte Cristo would put it better: “What a fool I was not to tear my heart out on the day when I resolved to avenge myself!” Ah, but what dangerous business this is. This artificial hardening is a dangerous crossroads, a bargain with our primal forces that not everyone escapes or can emerge from with clean hands. William James knew that every man is “ready to be savage in some cause.” The distinction, he said, between good people and bad people is “the choice of the cause.”

 

“Peter and a team of conspirators and a judge and a jury in Florida had spoken. They said: We don’t want to live in a world where the media can publish someone having sex—even if it’s just the “highlights”—simply because that person has talked about his sex life in public”

 

“We live in a world where only people like Peter Thiel can pull something so intentional and long-term off—and it’s not because, as Gawker has tried to make it seem, he’s rich. It’s because he’s one of the few who believes it can be done.”

 

“There is a moment in The Great Gatsby when Jay Gatsby introduces Nick Carraway to Meyer Wolfsheim, mentioning offhandedly that he is the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. The idea staggers Gatsby’s idealistic young friend. Of course, Carraway knew the series had been thrown. But “if I had thought of it at all,” he says, “I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain.” It was unbelievable to him then, as it is to us now, that a single person could have been responsible for changing the outcome of an event watched by some fifty million people. In real life, the 1919 World Series was fixed not by Wolfsheim, but with great skill and audacity by Arnold Rothstein, a Jewish gangster. A young lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army named Dwight Eisenhower eagerly followed the game as the scores came in via telegram, and like everyone else, never suspected a thing. He would remark years later that the revelation of the conspiracy that had thrown the series produced a profound change in his perspective about the world; it taught him never to trust in first appearances.”

 

“The essayist and investor Paul Graham, a peer and rival of Peter Thiel’s, has charted the trajectory of a start-up, with all its ups and downs. After the initial bump of media attention, the rush of excitement from the unexpected success, Graham says that the founders enter a phase where the novelty begins to wear off, and they quickly descend from their early euphoria into what he calls the “trough of sorrow.” A start-up launches with its investments, gets a few press hits, and then smacks right into reality. Many companies never make it out of this ditch. “The problem with the Silicon Valley,” as Jim Barksdale, the former CEO and president of Netscape, once put it, “is that we tend to confuse a clear view with a short distance.” Here, too, like the founders of a start-up, the conspirators have smacked into reality. The reality of the legal system. The defensive bulwark of the First Amendment. The reality of the odds. They have discovered the difference between a good plan and how far they’ll need to travel to fulfill it. They have trouble even serving Denton with papers. Harder has to request a 120-day extension just to wrap his head around Gawker’s financial and corporate structure. This is going to be harder than they thought. It always is. To say that in 2013 all the rush and excitement present on those courthouse steps several months earlier had dissipated would be a preposterous understatement. If a conspiracy, by its inherent desperation and disadvantaged position, is that long struggle in a dark hallway, here is the point where one considers simply sitting down and sobbing in despair, not even sure what direction to go. Is this even possible? Are we wrong? Machiavelli wrote that fortune—misfortune in fact—aims herself where “dikes and dams have not been made to contain her.” Clausewitz said that battle plans were great but ultimately subject to “friction”—delays, confusion, mistakes, and complications. What is friction? Friction is when you’re Pericles and you lay out a brilliant plan to defend Athens against Sparta and then your city is hit by the plague.”

 

“The line attributed to the management guru Peter Drucker is that culture eats strategy. It’s a truism that applies as much to conspiracies as it does to businesses. It doesn’t matter how great your plan is, it doesn’t matter who your people are, if what binds them all together is weak or toxic, so, too, will be the outcome—if you even get that far. But if the ties that bind you together are strong, if you have a sense of purpose and mission, you can withstand great trials.”

 

My Take

Conspiracy was a captivating page turner.  Even though you know how it ends, the book still manages to create a great deal of suspense and wonder as to how Thiel and Hogan are going to pull off a legal win.  While I had previously read Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday, I really preferred Conspiracy.  Holiday takes himself a bit too seriously at time, but he still manages to weave a compelling tale.

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370. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Doris Kearns Goodwin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Politics, History

916 pages, published September 26, 2006

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Written by acclaimed historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals showcases the political genius of Abraham Lincoln.  The book focuses on Lincoln’s appointment of former rivals for the Republican nomination William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates to his cabinet.  From his unlikely winning of the Republican nomination as an obscure one-term congressman and prairie lawyer to his management of  the Civil War and passage of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln prevailed over more prominent and accomplished men, but harnessed their talents to preserve the Union and win the war.

Quotes 

““Tolstoy went on to observe,”This little incident proves how largely the name of Lincoln is worshipped throughout the world and how legendary his personality has become. Now, why was Lincoln so great that he overshadows all other national heroes? He really was not a great general like Napoleon or Washington; he was not such a skillful statesman as Gladstone or Frederick the Great; but his supremacy expresses itself altogether in his peculiar moral power and in the greatness of his character.  Washington was a typical American. Napoleon was a typical Frenchman, but Lincoln was a humanitarian as broad as the world. He was bigger than his country – bigger than all the Presidents together.  We are still too near to his greatness,’ (Leo) Tolstoy (in 1908) concluded, ‘but after a few centuries more our posterity will find him considerably bigger than we do. His genius is still too strong and powerful for the common understanding, just as the sun is too hot when its light beams directly on us.’”

 

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

 

“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed, is more important than any other one thing.”

 

“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

 

“Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.”

 

“An adult friend of Lincoln’s: “Life was to him a school.”

 

“Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition,” he wrote. “I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.”

 

“The ambition to establish a reputation worthy of the esteem of his fellows so that his story could be told after his death had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood, his laborious efforts to educate himself, his string of political failures, and a depression so profound that he declared himself more than willing to die, except that “he had done nothing to make any human being remember that he had lived.”

 

“In fact, Lincoln and Stanton had already heard similar complaints. After dispatching investigators to look into General Grant’s behavior, however, they had concluded that his drinking did not affect his unmatched ability to plan, execute, and win battles. A memorable story circulated that when a delegation brought further rumors of Grant’s drinking to the president, Lincoln declared that if he could find the brand of whiskey Grant used, he would promptly distribute it to the rest of his generals!”

 

“This, then, is a story of Lincoln’s political genius revealed through his extraordinary array of personal qualities that enabled him to form friendships with men who had previously opposed him; to repair injured feelings that, left untended, might have escalated into permanent hostility; to assume responsibility for the failures of subordinates; to share credit with ease; and to learn from mistakes. He possessed an acute understanding of the sources of power inherent in the presidency, an unparalleled ability to keep his governing coalition intact, a tough-minded appreciation of the need to protect his presidential prerogatives, and a masterful sense of timing.”

 

“In order to “win a man to your cause,” Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, “the great high road to his reason.”

 

“Mental health, contemporary psychiatrists tell us, consists of the ability to adapt to the inevitable stresses and misfortunes of life. It does not mean freedom from anxiety and depression, but only the ability to cope with these afflictions in a healthy way.”

 

“It is not until one visits old, oppressed, suffering Europe, that he can appreciate his own government, “he observed, “that he realizes the fearful responsibility of the American people to the nations of the whole earth, to carry successfully through the experiment… That men are capable of self-government.”  

My Take

Team of Rivals helps you to understand why Abraham Lincoln is such a mythic figure in American history, but also reveals his most human qualities so that you have a better understanding of the man behind the legend.  A canny politician, an empathetic humanist and a righteous force of good, Lincoln was the man that the moment demanded and America is a better country because of his presidency.

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366. Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Losure

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Science, History

176 pages, published February 1, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Isaac the Alchemist is a biography of Isaac Newton, the father of physics, an extraordinary mathematician, and leader of the scientific revolution.  It starts with his boyhood living in an apothecary’s house and traces his life through Cambridge and adulthood where he made remarkable discoveries and immeasurably impacted science, physics and mathematics.

Quotes 

“The outlines of birds and beasts and sailing ships could still be seen in the apothecary’s attic in Grantham, along with the drawings of men and mathematical symbols. But the boy who who had made them was gone. He had taken his notebook with him: his secret world of star names and tawny lions and golden ink made from quicksilver.”

 

“He could travel in his mind, though. He did it all the time.”

 

“When your head is filled with things that other people don’t seem to give much thought to – chymistry, star names, mandrake root, mathematicall magick – it can be hard to make friends. Being short, secretive, and smarter than everybody else doesn’t help.” 

My Take

A bit dry, but I did learn a lot about Isaac Newton.

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