, , , , , ,

127. The Zookeeper’s Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Diane Ackerman

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Biography, Animals, World War II

368 pages, published September 17, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Zookeeper’s Wife opens in 1939 with an examination of the idyllic life led by Jan and Antonina Zabinski, the zookeepers who run the Warsaw Zoo and also live on its premises with their young son Rhys and an assortment of adopted wild animals.  Their existence in Eden soon turns into hell when Germany invades Poland dropping bombs that destroy much of Warsaw including a large part of the Zabinski’s zoo.  With most of their animals dead, Jan and Antonina use their zoo as a safe haven and halfway house for more than 300 Jews who would otherwise be destined for concentration camps.   

 

Quotes

“Why was it, she asked herself, that ‘animals can sometimes subdue their predatory ways in only a few months, while humans, despite centuries of refinement, can quickly grow more savage than any beast.”

 

“God may promise not to destroy creation, but it is not a promise humankind made – to our peril.”

 

“Germany’s crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.”

 

“The faint pink coating the treetops promised rippling buds, a sure sign of spring hastening in, right on schedule, and the animal world getting ready for its fiesta of courting and mating, dueling and dancing, suckling and grubbing, costume-making and shedding-in short, the fuzzy, fizzy hoopla of life’s ramshackle return.”

My Take

I have read a lot of books about World War II in the past few years and wasn’t sure if I wanted to tackle another one.  However, I’m glad that I gave The Zookeeper’s Wife a chance.  While there is a lot of devotion to the struggle against the Nazis and the suffering of the Jews that it is present in many World War II themed books, The Zookeeper’s Wife offers a unique perspective on this tumultuous time and brings to life the heroic deeds of Jan and Antonina Zabinski.  I can recommend not only this book, but also the movie version starring the beautiful and talented Jessica Chastain.

/by
, , , , , , ,

125. The Undoing Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Biography, Economics, History, Public Policy

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Undoing Project highlights the research performed by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky which focused on undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind systematically erred when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, and led to a new approach to government regulation. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms.

 

Quotes

“When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice.”

 

“The nice thing about things that are urgent,” he liked to say, “is that if you wait long enough they aren’t urgent anymore.”

 

“Maybe the mind’s best trick of all was to lead its owner to a feeling of certainty about inherently uncertain things.”

 

“Here was another way Israel was different from the United States: Its wars were short, and someone always won.”

 

“It’s hard to know how people select a course in life,” Amos said. “The big choices we make are practically random. The small choices probably tell us more about who we are. Which field we go into may depend on which high school teacher we happen to meet. Who we marry may depend on who happens to be around at the right time of life. On the other hand, the small decisions are very systematic. That I became a psychologist is probably not very revealing. What kind of psychologist I am may reflect deep traits.”

 

“It is amazing how dull history books are, given how much of what’s in them must be invented.”

 

“It is sometimes easier to make the world a better place than to prove you have made the world a better place.”

 

“Life is a book. The fact that it was a short book doesn’t mean it wasn’t a good book. It was a very good book.”

 

“The way it feels to me,’ he said, ‘is that there were certain ideas that I was put on this earth to think.  And now I can think them.”

 

“Wall Street trading desks at the end of each year offer a flavor of the problem. If a Wall Street trader expects to be paid a bonus of one million dollars and he’s given only half a million, he feels himself to be, and behaves as if he is, in the domain of losses. His reference point is an expectation of what he would receive. That expectation isn’t a stable number; it can be changed in all sorts of ways. A trader who expects to be given a million-dollar bonus, and who further expects everyone else on his trading desk to be given million-dollar bonuses, will not maintain the same reference point if he learns that everyone else just received two million dollars. If he is then paid a million dollars, he is back in the domain of losses. Danny would later use the same point to explain the behavior of apes in experiments researchers had conducted on bonobos. “If both my neighbor in the next cage and I get a cucumber for doing a great job, that’s great. But if he gets a banana and I get a cucumber, I will throw the cucumber at the experimenter’s face.” The moment one ape got a banana, it became the ape next door’s reference point. The reference point was a state of mind. Even in straight gambles you could shift a person’s reference point and make a loss seem like a gain, and vice versa. In so doing, you could manipulate the choices people made, simply by the way they were described.”

 

“No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”

 

“There was what people called “present bias”—the tendency, when making a decision, to undervalue the future in relation to the present. There was “hindsight bias”—which he thought of as the tendency for people to look at some outcome and assume it was predictable all along.”

 

“Confirmation bias,” he’d heard this called. The human mind was just bad at seeing things it did not expect to see, and a bit too eager to see what it expected to see. “Confirmation bias is the most insidious because you don’t even realize it is happening,” he said. A scout would settle on an opinion about a player and then arrange the evidence to support that opinion.”

 

““He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it.”

My Take

I am a fan of Michael Lewis, having read Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, Coach, The Big Short, and The Blind Side as well as many of his blog entries on Slate.  I really enjoyed his writing and was therefore looking forward to The Undoing Project which focused on Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Israeli behavioral psychologists who studied how and why we make certain decisions.  While the book was interesting at times, there was a lot of meandering that was less than compelling.  It was definitely not a page turner.  I don’t regret reading it, but am reluctant to give it a big recommendation.

/by
, , , ,

100. The Invention of Wings

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Boulder Public Library Librarian

Author:   Sue Monk Kidd

Genre:  Historical Fiction, Fiction, History

384 pages, published January 7, 2014

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The Invention of Wings, which is based on real people, tells the story of two girls in early nineteenth century Charleston.  Hetty “Handful” Grimke is a slave who works in the wealthy Grimke household with dreams of freedom.  Sarah Grimke idolizes her father who is a judge and wants to follow in his footsteps but is subject to the restrictions and expectations of that era placed on women. On her eleventh birthday, Sarah is given ownership of Handful and she tries in vain to free her, but promises Handful’s slave mother that she will someday accomplish this mission.  Over the next 35 years, both Handful and Sarah endure disappointment, loss, sorrow, and betrayal, but continue courageously on and discover their destiny in the process. Sarah, along with her younger sister, Angelina, becomes an abolitionist and feminist.  

 

Quotes

“My body might be a slave, but not my mind. For you, it’s the other way round.”

 

“We ‘re all yearning for a wedge of sky, aren ‘t we? I suspect God plants these yearnings in us so we’ll at least try and change the course of things. We must try, that’s all.”

 

“I saw then what I hadn’t seen before, that I was very good at despising slavery in the abstract, in the removed and anonymous masses, but in the concrete, intimate flesh of the girl beside me, I’d lost the ability to be repulsed by it. I’d grown comfortable with the particulars of evil. There’s a frightful muteness that dwells at the center of all unspeakable things, and I had found my way into it.”

 

“I’d been wandering about in the enchantments of romance, afflicted with the worst female curse on earth, the need to mold myself to expectations.”

 

“The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-com, and you never will outpace your grief.”

 

“It has come as a great revelation to me,” I wrote her, “that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it’s not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.”

 

“A slave was supposed to be like the Holy Ghost—don’t see it, don’t hear it, but it’s always hovering round on ready.”

 

“To remain silent in the face of evil is itself a form of evil.”

 

“If you must err, do so on the side of audacity.”

 

“I’d chosen the regret I could live with best, that’s all.”

 

“I longed for it in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life she didn’t choose.”

 

“How could I choose someone who would force me to give up my own small reach for meaning? I chose myself, and without consolation.”

 

“I said, “Where’s all that delivering God’s supposed to do?”

He snorted. “You’re right, the only deliverance is the one we get for ourselves. The Lord doesn’t have any hands and feet but ours.”

“That doesn’t say much for the Lord.”

“It doesn’t say much for us, either.”

 

“Her name was Mary, and there ends any resemblance to the mother of our Lord.”

 

“He that finds his life shall lose it, and he that loses his life shall find it.” Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

My Take

I had previously read The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd and enjoyed it, but liked The Invention of Wings even more.  With layers of detail on the place, time and characters, Kidd creates a world that feels immediate and real.  She also tells a compelling story that is interwoven with historical details about the Antebellum South and the movement for Abolition and Women’s rights.  I highly recommend The Invention of Wings, especially the audio version.

/1 Comment/by
, , , , ,

98. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:   Susan Orlean

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Biography, History, Animals

336 pages, published September 27, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

This book is a biography of Rin Tin Tin, the iconic star of movies and television, and his owner Lee Duncan and is a quintessentially Twentieth Century American tale.  Duncan allegedly found the first Rinty in the ruins of a bombed-out dog kennel in France during World War I, brought him to Los Angeles, trained him and got him into silent films.  By 1927, Rin Tin Tin had become Hollywood’s number one box-office star.  Susan Orlean’s book covers ninety years and explores the enduring bond between humans and how dogs were transformed from working farmhands to beloved family members as well as their role in the American entertainment industry and their use during war.

 

Quotes

“When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog’s being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery — Ivan Pavlov’s explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn’t even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person — not a dog professional — could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin’s performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary.”

 

“If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble—if only there could be a gathering up of permanence—how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach.”

 

“Television wasn’t getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle…Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.”

 

“It’s human nature to set a point in our minds when we feel triumphant and to measure everything that comes after it by how far we fall or rise from that point.”

 

My Take

Having enjoyed The Orchid Thief, a previous non-fiction effort from Susan Orlean, I was curious to see what she would do with the subject of Rin Tin Tin.  The result is an uneven book that suffers from its choice of subject matter.  Neither the dog nor his owner are all that interesting.  Going in, I really didn’t know much about Rin Tin Tin, so I did learn a lot about the movie and TV star and the entertainment era that he occupied.  If you have an interest in Rin Tin Tin, then this is the book for you.

/by
, , , ,

5. The Revenant

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Michael Punke

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Western

Info:  272 pages, published June 10, 2002

Format:   Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary 

Based on a true incident of heroism in the history of the American West, The Revenant tells the story of Hugh Glass, a Philadelphia-born adventurer and frontiersman.  Glass goes to sea at age 16 and enjoys a charmed life, including several years under the flag of the pirate Jean Lafitte and almost a year as a prisoner of the Loup Pawnee Indians on the plains between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.

In 1822, at age 36, Glass escapes, finds his way to St. Louis and enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River. After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.  His throat nearly ripped out, scalp hanging loose and deep slashing wounds to his back, shoulder and thigh, Glass appears to be mortally wounded.

Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible. Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger (who lived to become a frontier hero) to stand watch and bury him.

After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians. Taking Glass’s rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridget, leaving Glass. Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

 

Quotes

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

“He would crawl until his body could support a crutch.  If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead.”

“Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.”

“Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions.”

“No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human.”

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.”

Read more

/by