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520. The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:    Amy Chua, Jed Rubenfeld

Genre:  Non Fiction, Race, Ethnicity, Public Policy

336 pages, published February 14, 2014

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In The Triple Package, Yale Law School professors Amy Chua (aka the Tiger Mom) and husband Jed Rubenfeld set forth their thesis that certain cultural groups in America that possess a “triple package” of traits succeed in America at a signicantly higher rate than the rest of the population.  The three characteristics are:  members of such groups believe the group is exceptional (i.e. a superiority complex), but still feel they must prove themselves, and impulse control, i.e. work for future goals instead of immediate satisfaction.  They identify several groups in America which exhibit these triple package traits and have achieved outsized success including Mormons, Asians, Jews, Lebanese, and Nigerians.

Quotes 

“A life that doesn’t include hard-won accomplishment and triumph over obstacles may not be a satisfying one. There is something deeply fulfilling — even thrilling — in doing almost anything difficult extremely well. There is a joy and pride that come from pushing yourself to another level or across a new frontier. A life devoted only to the present — to feeling good in the now — is unlikely to deliver real fulfillment. The present moment by itself it too small, too hollow. We all need a future. Something beyond and greater than our own present gratification, at which to aim or feel we’ve contributed.”

 

 “For most Americans, especially now, striving and insecurity are likely to be rewarded with more striving and insecurity; you can do everything right and still have little to show for it.”

 

“Chinese Americans are three generations behind the Jews” as both Jewish Americans and Chinese Americans share many similar behaviors like being instructed to learn how to play a musical instrument when they were little and encouraged to become a doctor, teacher or a lawyer.

 

My Take

I found The Triple Package to be a quick and fascinating read.  Chua and Rubenfeld support their thesis with a broad array of evidence and provide an interesting discussion replete with myriad examples of successful ethnic groups.  This book will get you thinking and would be  great fodder for a group discussion.

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516. Anxious People

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Stephanie Schroeder

Author:    Fredrik Backman

Genre:  Fiction

341 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:   E-book

Summary

In Anxious People, a bank robber walks into an apartment open house after failing to actually rob the bank and holds an unlikely mix of strangers hostage.  The captives include a recently retired couple who buy fixer-uppers to avoid the painful truth that they can’t fix their own marriage, a wealthy banker who has shut herself off from the world, a young, nervous couple pregnant with their first child, an 87 year old, feisty woman, and a mystery man who has locked himself in the apartment’s only bathroom.  As the police try to free the hostages, we learn surprising truths about each of them, including the ultimately sympathetic bank robber.

Quotes 

“Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim.”

“They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.”

 

 “The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit.”

 

“That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between two people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s.”

 

 “Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.”

 

“This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is.”

 

“Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.”

 

“We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow.”

 

“Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.”

 

“God doesn’t protect people from knives, sweetheart. That’s why God gave us other people, so we can protect each other.”

 

“Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”

“No.”

“You’re never more important that you are then.”

 

“Boats that stay in the harbor are safe, sweetheart, but that’s not what boats were built for.”

 

“Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks.”

 

“that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.”

 

“We’re trying to be grown-up and love each other and understand how the hell you’re supposed to insert USB leads. We’re looking for something to cling on to, something to fight for, something to look forward to. We’re doing all we can to teach our children how to swim. We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.  Perhaps we hurried past each other in a crowd today, and neither of us noticed, and the fibers of your coat brushed against mine for single moment and then we were gone. I don’t know who you are.  But when you get home this evening, when this day is over and the night takes us, allow yourself a deep breath. Because we made it through this day as well. There’ll be another one along tomorrow.”

 

“We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.”

 

“Something my dad says…He says you end up marrying the one you don’t understand. Then you spend the rest of your life trying.”

 

“Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure.”

 

“Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

 

“We are asleep until we fall in love.”

 

“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”

 

“You can’t live long with the ones who are only beautiful, Jules. But the funny ones, oh, they last a lifetime.”

 

“children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving.”

 

“This book is dedicated to the voices inside my head, the most remarkable of my friends.  And to my wife, who lives with us.”

 My Take

Anxious People is the sixth book that I have read by best-selling Swedisth author Fredrik Backman (previous reads were:  A Man Called Ove, Beartown, Us Against You, Britt-Marie Was Here  And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer) and I like his wry, insightful style that peels back the layers of human nature.  He always has something interesting to say about the way human beings function and interact with each other and Anxious People is one of his better efforts.

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515. Discrimination and Disparities

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Thomas Sowell

Genre:  Non Fiction, Cultural, Public Policy, Economics

192 pages, published March 20, 2018

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In Discrimination and Disparities, Thomas Sowell, famed economist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, explains why one-factor explanations of economic outcome differences as discrimination, exploitation or genetics are misleading and wrong.  With reams of empirical evidence, Dr. Sowell backs up his analysis demonstrates why so many “mean well” policy fixes have turned out to be counterproductive.

Quotes 

“The crucial question is not whether evils exist but whether the evils of the past or present are automatically the cause of major economic, educational and other social disparities today. The bedrock assumption underlying many political or ideological crusades is that socioeconomic disparities are automatically somebody’s fault, so that our choices are either to blame society or to ‘blame the victim.’ Yet whose fault are demographic differences, geographic differences, birth order differences or cultural differences that evolved over the centuries before any of us were born?”

 

“24 percent of something is larger than 73 percent of nothing.”

 

 “Wrongs abound in times and places around the world – inflicted on, and perpetrated by, people of virtually every race, creed and color. But what can any society today hope to gain by having newborn babies in that society enter the word as heirs to prepackaged grievances against other babies born into that same society on the same day.”

 

“Any serious consideration of the world as it is around us today must tell us that maintaining common decency, much less peace and harmony, among living contemporaries is a major challenge, both among nations and within nations. To admit that we can do nothing about what happened among the dead is not to give up the struggle for a better world, but to concentrate our efforts where they have at least some hope of making things better for the living.”

 

“Engels said: “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

 

“All that the government can do in reality is change the tax rate. How much tax revenue that will produce depends on how people react.”

 

“Alternative explanations for these changing patterns of racial differences—such as racism, poverty or inferior education among blacks—cannot establish even correlation with changing employment outcomes over the years, because all those things were worse in the first half of the twentieth century, when the unemployment rate among black teenagers in 1948 was far lower and not significantly different from the unemployment rate among white teenagers.”

 

“In seeking to establish the causes of poverty and other social problems among black Americans, for example, sociologist William Julius Wilson pointed to factors such as “the enduring effects of slavery, Jim Crow segregation, public school segregation, legalized discrimination, residential segregation, the FHA’s redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s and ’50s, the construction of public housing projects in poor black neighborhoods, employer discrimination, and other racial acts and processes.”1 These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be “yes.” Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.2 The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole.3 In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.4 Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today’s black married couples exempt from slavery and other injustices? As far back as 1969, young black males whose homes included newspapers, magazines, and library cards, and who also had the same education as young white males, had similar incomes as their white counterparts.5 Do racists care whether blacks have reading material and library cards?”

 

“When John Rawls, in his A Theory of Justice repeatedly referred to outcomes that ‘society’ can ‘arrange,’ these euphemisms finessed aside the plain fact that only government has the power to override millions of people’s mutually agreed transactions terms. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction.”

 

“The time is long overdue to count the costs of runaway rhetoric and heedless accusations – especially since most of the costs, including the high social cost of a breakdown of law and order, are paid by vulnerable people for whose benefit such rhetoric and such accusations are ostensibly being made.”

 

 “Discrimination as an explanation of economic and social disparities may have a similar emotional appeal for many. But we can at least try to treat these and other theories as testable hypotheses. The historic consequences of treating particular beliefs as sacred dogmas, beyond the reach of evidence or logic, should be enough to dissuade us from going down that road again—despite how exciting or emotionally satisfying political dogmas and the crusades resulting from those dogmas can be, or how convenient in sparing us the drudgery and discomfort of having to think through our own beliefs or test them against facts.”

 

“What seems a more tenable conclusion is that, as economic historian David S. Landes put it, “The world has never been a level playing field.”

 

“Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed.64 But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.65”

 

“But, if the wealth of rich capitalists comes from exploitation of poor workers, then we might expect to find that where there are larger concentrations of rich capitalists, we would find correspondingly larger concentrations of poverty.”

 

“Economists tend to rely on “revealed preference” rather than verbal statements. That is, what people do reveals what their values are, better than what they say.”

 

“Statistics compiled from what people say may be worse than useless, if they lead to a belief that those numbers convey a reality that can be relied on for serious decision-making about social policies.”

 

“If you are not prepared to undergo the extended toil and sacrifice that some particular endeavor may require, then despite having all the native potential for great success in that endeavor, and with all the doors of opportunity wide open, you can nevertheless become an utter failure.”

 

“Most notable achievements involve multiple factors—beginning with a desire to succeed in the particular endeavor, and a willingness to do what it takes, without which all the native ability in an individual and all the opportunity in a society mean nothing, just as the desire and the opportunity mean nothing without the ability.”

 

“As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts.”

 

“In no society have all regions and all parts of the population developed equally. Fernand Braudel”

 

“…lifelong benefits [to students who learn to think for themselves] include a healthy skepticism towards political slogans and a healthy desire to check out the facts before repeating rhetoric on other issues.”

 

“Confiscating physical wealth for the purpose of redistribution is confiscating something that will be used up over time, and cannot be replaced without the human capital that created it.

 

“People who depict markets as cold, impersonal institutions, and their own notions as humane and compassionate, have it directly backwards. It is when people make their own economic decisions, taking into account costs that matter to themselves, and known only to themselves, that this knowledge becomes part of the trade-odds they choose, whether as consumers or producers.”

 

“Despite the inability to confiscate and redistribute human capital, nevertheless human capital is – ironically – one of the few things that can be spread to others without those with it having any less remaining for themselves. But one of the biggest obstacles to this happening is the ‘social justice’ vision, in which the fundamental problem of the less fortunate is not an absence of sufficient human capital, but the presence of other people’s malevolence. For some, abandoning that vision would mean abandoning a moral melodrama, starring themselves as crusaders against the forces of evil. How many are prepared to give up all that – with all its psychic, political and other rewards – is an open question.”

 

“The first edition of this book addressed the seemingly invincible fallacy that statistical disparities in socioeconomic outcomes imply either biased treatment of the less fortunate or genetic deficiencies in the less fortunate.”

 

My Take

Wow!  I have long heard of Dr. Thomas Sowell and read many of his articles, but had never read any of his books.  I am glad to have finally rectified that by reading Discrimination and Disparities.  He is a brilliant economist and compelling writer who backs up absolutely everything he puts forth with numerous facts and logical arguments.  If you actually cared about helping the poor or disadvantaged rather than just make yourself feel better by advocating an emotionally appealing position, you would do well to read Dr. Sowell and consider his well thought out and empirically supported arguments.  My only critique of the book is that it can be a bit dense at times.  Even so, well worth a read.

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512. Don’t Burn This Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Dave Rubin

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

256 pages, published April 28, 2020

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

In his first book, host of the political talk show The Rubin Report, Dave Rubin writes about his political oddessey from an unquestioning left winger to a free thinking defender of liberty, i.e. a “classical liberal.”  He describes how the woke mob works to censor and shut down speech and ideas with which it disagrees.  He advocates the importance of standing up for classical liberal values and emphasizes that the future of our country depends on it.

Quotes 

“Don’t Burn This Book may not usher in world peace, balance the national debt, or improve your sex life, but while those are worthy pursuits, that wasn’t my goal. Instead, I want to champion the values that keep people safe, sane, and free.”

“Exhibit A: I’m guessing you’re no fan of socialism, which was a founding principle of the Nazi movement. The name “Nazi” is an acronym for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, which most of today’s Democrat socialists conveniently forget. Actually, that’s an understatement. These people don’t just overlook this truth, they’ve totally rewritten history on the matter. These days, Nazism gets associated with conservatism at the drop of a hat, but historically it stems from the left. Adolf Hitler? An art-loving vegetarian who seized power by wooing voters away from Germany’s Social Democrat and communist parties. Italy’s Benito Mussolini? Raised on Karl Marx’s Das Kapital before starting his career as a left-wing journalist and, later, implementing a deadly fascist regime.”

 

“Harvard University has chosen to make it harder for Asian applicants to be accepted into the university because they outperform their peers. So yes, systemic racism is real . . . at America’s top university.”

 

“I’ve reluctantly reached after years of watching my old “team” transform into a baying mob of hysterical puritans—a feral gang that sows division through identity politics and encourages societal tribes to rank themselves in a pecking order of “oppression.”

 

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.” In other words, today’s progressives have now become the sexists and racists they’ve claimed to hate.”

 

“If we’re going to confront reality honestly, then nothing can be off-limits. Our power structures, our political leaders, and our religious institutions all must be fair game in a free society. There’s a fine line when jokes and mockery become cruel and pointless, but this is the line comedians have toed since the beginning of time. We must relentlessly defend their ability not only to push our limits but also to occasionally trip over the line into sacrilege and controversy.”

 

“Researchers at the University of Missouri had found a “gender equality paradox” when they studied 475,000 teenagers across the globe. They noted that hyperegalitarian countries such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden had a smaller percentage of female STEM graduates than countries such as Albania and Algeria, which are considered less advanced”

 

“Worse still, they implement all of these things with brute force: violence, censorship, character assassination, smear campaigns, doxing, trolling, deplatforming, and online witch hunts. Tricks that are deliberately designed to leave people down and out. Ideally, jobless and without the resources to push back.”

 

“This is because outward virtue signaling is separate from being a considerate, moral person. Whereas the latter is central for common decency (and is something we should all strive for), the former is just a display of faux morality. One that’s designed to offer protection from the mob ever turning on them. It’s a protection racket—a form of insurance. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.”

 

“The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life.”

 

“Suddenly, out of nowhere, rationalizing Islamic terror had become a progressive position. According to progressives, it was another 2-D argument: brown people = good, white people = bad.”

 

“Free-thinking is the new counterculture, which makes it cutting-edge and subversive, like punk rock or hip-hop in the early 1980s.”

 

“It’s no coincidence that social justice warriors are frequently out of shape, poorly dressed, and have messy hair, along with their overall disheveled appearance. If some dress for success, they dress for failure.”

 

“I’m black—not African American. That’s a term I don’t like. I was born in America and I’ve never been to Africa. It’s an absurd term. A term that Jesse Jackson crammed down the throats of the media. It’s ridiculous.”

 

“Elder was right and he damn well knew it. “The biggest burden that black people have is being raised without fathers,” he declared. “A black kid raised without a dad is five times more likely to be poor and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in jail. When I hear people tell me about systemic racism or unconscious racism I always say ‘give me an example.’ And almost nobody can do it. I give the facts . . . and [according to left-wingers] the facts are racist.”

 

“As he noted in The Daily Signal, children from fatherless homes are likelier to drop out of high school, die by suicide, have behavioral disorders, join gangs, commit crimes, and end up in prison. They are also more likely to live in poverty-stricken households. Conversely, nuclear families—whether black or white—are richer in all ways.”

 

 “Thomas Sowell nailed it when he said: “No government of the left has done as much for the poor as capitalism has. Even when it comes to the redistribution of income, the left talks the talk but the free market walks the walk.”

 

“But instead of contributing to the conversation like a grown-up, he basically shouted Harris and Maher down and called them racists, which has now become a standard debating tactic for most progressives.”

 

 “I’m a free-speech absolutist. Yes, even when it comes to opinions I find abhorrent. In fact, specifically when it comes to those opinions. The only exceptions to this rule have already been specified by the Supreme Court of the United States: calling for direct violence against a person or specific group, yelling “fire” in a crowded theater (with the intent to incite iminent lawless action), and defaming somebody through libel or slander. Everything else should get a free pass, every single time. No exceptions, ever.”

 

“The motto is no longer ‘I think therefore I am.’ It’s not even ‘I’m a victim therefore I am.’ It’s now, ‘I self-flagellate therefore I am,’” he says. “It’s almost a theater of the absurd. The currency is victimhood by proxy. Whoever can grovel the most is the currency of the radical left.” Don’t be like them. Be better.”

 

“For her, it’s profoundly absurd that people—specifically, fellow Americans . . . many of them educated, middle-class millennials who’ve never experienced anything like real hardship—can hate a country that frequently does so much good, both domestically and internationally.”

 

My Take

My son Nick gave me Don’t Burn This Book as a birthday gift.  I had vaguely heard of Dave Rubin before reading it, but really didn’t know anything about him.  After whipping through it in two days, I have to say that I am now a fan.  Rubin has an engaging, straightforward, humorous style that, along with spot-on content for our troubled times, made this book a pleasure to read.  I wholeheartedly agree with his robust defense of free speech and his analysis of other issues confronting our country.  I look forward to checking out The Rubin Report.

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497. Troubled Blood

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Joni Renee Zalk

Author:   Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling)

Genre:   Fiction, Crime, Suspense, Thriller, Mystery

944 pages, published  September 15, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Troubled Blood is the fifth book in J.K. Rowling’s Cormoran Strike detective series.  Strike and his partner Robin Ellacott are hired by a woman whose mother, Margot Bamborough, disappeared forty years ago in 1974 without a trace.  As they investigate this cold case, Strike and Robin encounter tarot cards, a psychopathic serial killer and witnesses who cannot be trusted, along with their own long simmering feelings for each other.

Quotes 

“We aren’t our mistakes. It’s what we do about the mistake that shows who we are.”

 

“Every married person he knew seemed desperate to chivvy others into matrimony, no matter how poor an advertisement they themselves were for the institution.”

 

“Then he closed his eyes, and like millions of his fellow humans, wondered why troubles could never come singly, but in avalanches, so that you became increasingly destabilized with every blow that hit you.”

 

 “. . . she’d seen a flicker of something in his face that wasn’t mere friendship, and they’d hugged, and she’d felt . . . Best not to dwell on that hug, on how like home it had felt, on how a kind of insanity had gripped her at that moment, and she’d imagined him saying ‘come with me’ and known she’d have gone if he had.”

 

“But he was her best friend. This admission, held at bay for so long, caused an almost painful twist in Robin’s heart, not least because she knew it would be impossible ever to tell Strike so.”

 

“But people who fundamentally change are rare, in my experience, because it’s bloody hard work compared to going on a march or waving a flag. Have we met a single person on this case who’s radically different to the person they were forty years ago?”  “I don’t know . . . I think I’ve changed,” said Robin, then felt embarrassed to have said it out loud.  Strike looked at her without smiling for the space it took him to chew and swallow a chip, then said, “Yeah. But you’re exceptional, aren’t you?”

 

 “How could he say, look, I’ve tried not to fancy you since you first took your coat off in this office. I try not to give names to what I feel for you, because I already know it’s too much, and I want peace from the shit that love brings in its wake. I want to be alone, and unburdened, and free.  But I don’t want you to be with anyone else. I don’t want some other bastard to persuade you into a second marriage. I like knowing the possibility’s there, for us to, maybe . . .  Except, it’ll go wrong, of course, because it always goes wrong, because if I were the type for permanence, I’d already be married. And when it goes wrong, I’ll lose you for good, and this thing we’ve built together, which is literally the only good part of my life, my vocation, my pride, my greatest achievement, will be forever fucked, because I won’t find anyone I enjoy running things with, the way I enjoy running them with you, and everything afterward will be tainted by the memory of you.

 

 “If I’ve taken you for granted,” said Strike, “I’m sorry. You’re the best I’ve got.”

 

“I think there are a lot of nutters in the world, and the less we reward them for their nuttery, the better for all of us.”

 

“He was well aware that he hadn’t told Polworth the whole truth about his relationship with Robin Ellacott, which, after all, was nobody else’s business. The truth was that his feelings contained nuances and complications that he preferred not to examine. For instance, he had a tendency, when alone, bored, or low-spirited, to want to hear her voice.”

 

“And there was something more, something highly unusual. Strike had never once made her feel physically uncomfortable. Two of them in the office, for a long time the only workers at the agency, and while Robin was a tall woman, he was far bigger, and he’d never made her feel it, as so many men did . . .”

 

“The roses, which were for Joan, were also for him: they said, you won’t be alone, you have something you’ve built, and all right, it might not be a family, but there are still people who care about you waiting in London. Strike told himself ‘people,’ because there were five names on the card, but he turned away thinking only of Robin.”

 

“. . . Strike explained about his failed attempt to buy Robin perfume, the previous December.

‘ . . . so I asked the assistant, but he kept showing me things with names like . . . I dunno . . . “Shaggable You” . . . ‘  The laugh Robin failed to repress was so loud that people turned to look at her . . .  and I panicked,’ Strike admitted . . .”

 

“Robin was thinking, is this where single people end up, people without children to look out for them, without double incomes? In small boxes, living vicariously through reality stars?”

 

“She’s lived with it for forty years . . . People who live with something that massive stop being able to see it. It’s the backdrop of their lives. It’s only glaringly obvious to everyone else.”

 

My Take

Having read the four previous Cormoran Strike novels ( The Cuckoo’s Calling, The Silkworm, Career of Evil and Lethal White) I was really looking forward to Troubled Blood.  I was not disappointed.  While J.K. Rowling is adept at spinning an engrossing mystery, this series really shines when it focuses on the protagonists Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacot.  The two are fascinating characters and the “will they, won’t they” dynamic really works.  At 944 pages, Troubled Blood is a commitment to read, but it is well worth the time.

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490. My Dark Vanessa

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Valerie Flores

Author:   Kate Elizabeth Russell

Genre:    Fiction

385  pages, published  March 10, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

My Dark Vanessa  tells the haunting story of 15 year old Vanessa Wye, a fifteen year old girl, and her long term romantic entanglement with Jacob Strane, her 42 year old English teacher a private boarding school.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell explores the psychological dynamics of the relationship between a precocious yet naïve teenage girl and her magnetic and manipulative teacher and how Vanessa slowly comes to terms with the true nature of the liason.

Quotes 

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.” “I know,” she says. “Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”

 

“People will risk everything for a little bit of something beautiful.”

“Because even if I sometimes use the word abuse to describe certain things that were done to me, in someone else’s mouth the word turns ugly and absolute. It swallows up everything that happened.”

 

“Kneeling before me, he lays his head on my lap and says, ‘I’m going to ruin you.”

 

“To be groomed is to be loved and handled like a precious, delicate thing.”

 

“I wonder how much victimhood they’d be willing to grant a girl like me.”

 

“Pathetically in love with you.” As soon as he says this, I become someone somebody else is in love with, and not just some dumb boy my own age but a man who has already lived an entire life, who has done and seen so much and still thinks I’m worthy of his love. I feel forced over a threshold, thrust out of my ordinary life into a place where it’s possible for grown men to be so pathetically in love with me they fall at my feet.”

 

“He wants to make sure he’ll always be there, no matter what. He wants to leave his fingerprints all over me, every piece of muscle and bone.”

 

“I don’t say it, but sometimes I feel like that’s exactly what he’s doing to me—breaking me apart, putting me back together as someone new.”

 

“Strane says I need to contextualize my reluctance to grow up, that everyone my age is drawn to self-victimization. “And that mentality is especially difficult for young women to resist,” he says. “The world has a vested interest in keeping you helpless.” He says as a culture we treat victimhood as an extension of childhood. So when a woman chooses victimhood, she is therefore freed from personal responsibility, which then compels others to take care of her, which is why once a woman chooses victimhood, she will continue to choose it again and again.”

 

“I’m starting to understand that the longer you get away with something, the more reckless you become, until it’s almost as if you want to get caught.”

 

“This, I think, is the cost of telling, even in the guise of fiction. Once you do, it’s the only thing about you anyone will ever care about. It defines you whether you want it to or not.”

 

“Girls in those stories are always victims, and I am not. And it doesn’t have anything to do with what Strane did or didn’t do to me when I was younger. I’m not a victim because I never wanted to be, and If I didn’t want to be, then I’m not. That’s how it works. The difference between rape and sex is state of mind. You can’t rape the willing, right?”

 

“He touched me first, said he wanted to kiss me, told me he loved me. Every first step was taken by him. I don’t feel forced, and I know I have the power to say no, but that isn’t the same as being in charge. But maybe he has to believe that. Maybe there’s a whole list of things he has to believe.”

 

“Somehow I sensed what was coming for me even then. Really, though, what girl doesn’t? It looms over you, that threat of violence. They drill the danger into your head until it starts to feel inevitable. You grow up wondering when it’s finally going to happen.”

 

“The excuses we make for them are outrageous, but they’re nothing compared with the ones we make for ourselves.”

 

“Hide all you want, but the truth will always find you.”

 

My Take

While the Lolitaesq premise of My Dark Vanessa is disturbing on many levels, it is an engrossing, page turner that sucks you into its story.  Author Kate Elizabeth Russell does a masterful job of showing the reader how easily this atrocity could happen and how hard it is of protagonist Vanessa Wye to let go of her idealized version of the past.

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488. Appropos of Nothing

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Woody Allen

Genre:    Non Fiction, Memoir, Humor

396 pages, published March 23, 2020

Reading Format:   e-Book

Summary

Appropos of Nothing is a memoir by Woody Allen which tells the story of his life, from his childhood in Brooklyn to his work as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, to his stand up comedy days to his impressive movie career to his troubles with Mia Farrow.

Quotes 

“Self-obsession, that treacherous time waster.”

 

“Rather than live on in the hearts and mind of the public, I prefer to live on in my apartment.”

 

“In the end this obsession for conformity leads to fascism.”

 

“In retrospect, the red flags existed every few feet, but nature provides us with a denial mechanism, else we couldn’t make it through the days, as Freud teaches us, as Nietzsche teaches us, as O’Neill teaches us, as T. S. Eliot teaches us. Unfortunately, I was never a good student.”

 

“I don’t know what the hell I was thinking; I hated nature, and more than nature I hated being a car owner.”

 

“I just didn’t grasp the finer points and once tipped a process server who knocked on my door and handed me a summons.”

 

“And I definitely do not want to be on one of those first rockets to outer space, to glimpse Earth from afar and experience weightlessness. The truth is, I hate weightlessness; I am a big fan of gravity and hope it lasts.”

 

“Christ, I’m afraid of dogs. And I’m talking about all dogs, including Yorkies. You’ll hate me, but I don’t like pets. Naturally, I don’t like being bitten and I hate being shed on, licked, or barked at. On the evolutionary scale, I always regarded all animals as failed humans. I also don’t like being sung to by a canary or when fish in a tank look back at me.”

 

“Her preference was to go by pistol shot, mine by placing my head in the dishwasher and pressing Full Cycle.”

 

“being a misanthropist has its saving grace—people can never disappoint you.”

 

“If 80 percent of life is showing up, the other 80 percent, as Yogi Berra might’ve said, is chance.”

 

“For better or worse, I sort of live in a bubble. I gave up reading about myself decades ago and have no interest in other people’s appraisal or analysis of my work. This sounds arrogant, but it’s not. I do not consider myself superior or aloof, nor do I have a particularly high opinion of my own product. I was taught by Danny Simon to rely on my own judgment, and I don’t like to waste precious time on what can easily become a distraction. Friends have often encouraged me to at least treat myself to the enjoyment of once in a while reading some respectable person’s high praise and maybe even in extreme cases consider responding when attacked, but I have no desire to do either.”

 

“To a human, the fall-colored leaves are gorgeous. To a red or yellow leaf, I can guarantee they find the green ones lovelier.”

 

“There are still loonies who think I married my daughter, who think Soon-Yi was my child, who think Mia was my wife, who think I adopted Soon-Yi, who think that Obama wasn’t American. But there was never any trial. I was never charged with anything, as it was clear to the investigators nothing had ever occurred.”

 

My Take

Since my early 20’s, I have been a fan of Woody Allen (both his books and his movies).  Appropos of Nothing, a memoir which covers his entire life, is an entertaining walk down memory lane with lots of behind the scenes stories on his movies and career.  Allen also spends a fair amount of time address the whole Soon-Yi scandal and it is refreshing to hear his perspective.  While he is a self-absorbed artist who often fails to contemplate how his actions will be viewed, he is nevertheless a comedic genius who has led an incredibly fascinating and productive life.  I highly recommend this book, especially if you are a fan.

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481. No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Deidre Farrell

Author:   Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business

464 pages, published September 8, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In No Rules Rules, Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings and business writer Erin Meyer explore the unique culture behind one of the world’s most innovative and successful companies.  Launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, Netflix has reinvented itself multiple times. Along the way, the company adopted several counterintuitive, radical management principles. Hastings built a corporate culture focused on freedom, responsibility and innovation.  At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies, pay is overmarket with no bonuses, adequate performance gets a generous severance, hard work is irrelevant, you don’t try to please your boss, but give candid feedback instead.

Quotes 

“The Fearless Organization, she explains that if you want to encourage innovation, you should develop an environment where people feel safe to dream, speak up, and take risks. The safer the atmosphere, the more innovation you will have.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively. What’s more, none of the other principles can work unless you have ensured this first dot is in place.”

 

“even when other team members were exceptionally talented and intelligent, one individual’s bad behavior brought down the effectiveness of the entire team. In dozens of trials, conducted over month-long periods, groups with one underperformer did worse than other teams by a whopping 30 to 40 percent.”

 

“it made our workforce smarter. When you give low-level employees access to information that is generally reserved for high-level executives, they get more done on their own. They work faster without stopping to ask for information and approval. They make better decisions without needing input from the top.”

 

“A fast and innovative workplace is made up of what we call “stunning colleagues”—highly talented people, of diverse backgrounds and perspectives, who are exceptionally creative, accomplish significant amounts of important work, and collaborate effectively.”

 

“Humility is important in a leader and role model. When you succeed, speak about it softly or let others mention it for you. But when you make a mistake say it clearly and loudly, so that everyone can learn and profit from your errors. In other words, “Whisper wins and shout mistakes.”

 

“If you have a team of five stunning employees and two adequate ones, the adequate ones will sap managers’ energy, so they have less time for the top performers, reduce the quality of group discussions, lowering the team’s overall IQ, force others to develop ways to work around them, reducing efficiency, drive staff who seek excellence to quit, and show the team you accept mediocrity, thus multiplying the problem.”

 

“TALENT DENSITY: TALENTED PEOPLE MAKE ONE ANOTHER MORE EFFECTIVE”

 

“I recommend instead focusing first on something much more difficult: getting employees to give candid feedback to the boss. This can be accompanied by boss-to-employee feedback. But it’s when employees begin providing truthful feedback to their leaders that the big benefits of candor really take off.”

 

“Steve Jobs said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

 

“Only say about someone what you will say to their face.”

 

“TELL THE EMPEROR WHEN HE HAS NO CLOTHES…The higher you get in an organization, the less feedback you receive, and the more likely you are to ‘come to work naked’ or make another error that’s obvious to everyone but you.”

 

“My performance would ultimately be judged, not on whether any individual bet failed, but on my overall ability to use those chips to move the business forward. Jack made it clear that at Netflix you don’t lose your job because you make a bet that doesn’t work out. Instead you lose your job for not using your chips to make big things happen or for showing consistently poor judgment over time.”

 

My Take

Surprisingly for a business book, No Rules Rules was a captivating read.  The dynamic, unique culture (which focuses on empowering individual employees) at Netflix is very different from mainstream corporate America, but it works.  This book was a page turner and I highly recommend it.

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Ask Again, Yes

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Mary Beth Keane

Genre:   Fiction

390 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Ask Again, Yes is a work of fiction about two neighboring families in a suburban town outside of New York City, the bond between their children, a tragedy that echos over four decades, the daily intimacies of marriage, and the power of forgiveness.

Quotes 

“She’d learned that the beginning of one’s life mattered the most, that life was top-heavy that way.”

“The thing is, Peter, grown-ups don’t know what they’re doing any better than kids do. That’s the truth.”

 

“They’d both learned that a memory is a fact that has been dyed and trimmed and rinsed so many times that it comes out looking almost unrecognizable to anyone else who was in that room or anyone who was standing on the grass beneath that telephone pole.”

 

“We repeat what we don’t repair,”

 

“…and sometimes when he watched her – searching for something in her bag, or peeling an apple with her knuckle guiding the blade – he felt a shiver of panic that he’d almost not met her.”

“There was no predicting where life would go. There was no real way for a person to try something out, see if he liked it – the words he’d chosen when he told his uncle Patsy that he’d gotten into the police academy – because you try it and try it and try it a little longer and next thing it’s who you are.”

 

“This was the great shock of America, winters that would cut the face off a person, summers that were as thick and as soggy as bogs.”

 

“She did remember some things, but those memories were of a poor quality, like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens.”

 

“And he’d figured out that the fun was often not the thing itself—the party, the keg stand, the naked running into the duck pond—but the endless talking about it after, the reliving and describing, and laughing about it in front of people who wished they’d been there. Used to be he was one of the kids listening, one of the kids who missed everything, but now, since college, since Kate, he was in the stories.”

 

My Take

Mary Beth Keane is a gifted writer and it was a pleasure to read Ask Again, Yes.  She creates such multi-dimensional characters that when the book is over, you feel that you really know these people.  I also found her exploration of the themes of acceptance and forgiveness to be thought provoking and powerful.  I will read her again.

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473. Better

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Atul Gawande

Genre:   Non Fiction, Health, Medicine, Science, Memoir, Essays

273 pages, published April 3, 2007

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

In Better, surgeon and author Atul Gawande explores different aspects of medical care (hygiene, obstetrics, medical malpractice, battlefield surgical tents in Iraq, doctor assisted administration of the death penalty, the treatment of polio in India) and explores how to bring improvements to different systems.

Quotes 

“Better is possible. It does not take genius. It takes diligence. It takes moral clarity. It takes ingenuity. And above all, it takes a willingness to try.”

 

“People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as “the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken.”… Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.”

 

“The seemingly easiest and most sensible rule for a doctor to follow is: Always Fight. Always look for what more you could do.”

 

“We are used to thinking of doctoring as a solitary, intellectual task. But making medicine go right is less often like making a difficult diagnosis than like making sure everyone washes their hands.”

 

“The hardest question for anyone who takes responsibility for what he or she does is, What if I turn out to be average?”

 

“Doctors quickly learn that how much they make has little to do with how good they are. It largely depends on how they handle the business side of their practice.”

 

“Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine—an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets—can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science, more lives than research on the genome, stem cell therapy, cancer vaccines, and all the other laboratory work we hear about in the news.”

 

“Ingenuity is often misunderstood. It is not a matter of superior intelligence but of character. It demands more than anything a willingness to recognize failure, to not paper over the cracks, and to change. It arises from deliberate, even obsessive, reflection on failure and a constant searching for new solutions.”

“We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right – one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.”

 

“Human birth…is a solution to an evolutionary problem: how a mammal can walk upright, which requires a small, fixed, bony pelvis, and also possess a large brain, which entails a baby whose head is too big to fit through that small pelvis…in a sense, all human mothers give birth prematurely. Other mammals are born mature enough to walk and seek food within hours; our newborns are small and helpless for months.”

 

“Betterment is perpetual labor. The world is chaotic, disorganized, and vexing, and medicine is nowhere spared that reality. To complicate matters, we in medicine are also only human ourselves. We are distractible, weak, and given to our own concerns. Yet still, to live as a doctor is to live so that one’s life is bound up in others’ and in science and in the messy, complicated connection between the two It is to live a life of responsibility. The question then, is not whether one accepts the responsibility. Just by doing this work, one has. The question is, having accepted the responsibility, how one does such work well.”

 

My Take

I always think the mark of a good non fiction book is how much I learned from reading it.  Well, I learned a lot about modern medicine after reading Better.   It also didn’t hurt that Atul Gawande (author of Being Mortal) is a talented writer with something to say.

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