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453. Middle England

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:    Jonathan Coe

Genre:   Fiction, Foreign

448 pages, published August 20, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Middle England follows the lives of several interrelated Brits in the ten years leading up to Brexit:  newlyweds Ian and Sophie, whose different world views may imperil their marriage; Doug, a journalist who writes about politics while parenting a radical SJW teenage daughter; Benjamin Trotter, who finds moderate career success in middle age with the publication of a book, and his father Colin, whose last wish is to vote LEAVE in the Brexit referendum.

Quotes 

“Some people don’t realize that a straight ‘No’ can be the kindest answer in the world.”

 

“Making armaments, they were, munitions, aeroplane parts. Can you imagine! Can you imagine what it was like, hundreds of people, working together like that, for the war effort? What a spirit, eh? What a country we were back then! ‘Whatever happened to all that? It was bad enough when I was working here. Every man for himself, survival of the fittest, I’m all right, Jack. That’s what was starting to take over. But now it’s even worse, it’s just . . . fancy clothes and Prosecco bars and bloody . . . packets of salad. We’ve gone soft, that’s the problem. No wonder the rest of the world’s laughing at us.’”

 

“the unspeakable truth: that Sophie (and everyone like her) and Helena (and everyone like her) might be living cheek-by-jowl in the same country, but they also lived in different universes, and these universes were separated by a wall, infinitely high, impermeable, a wall built out of fear and suspicion and even –  perhaps – a little bit of those most English of all qualities, shame and embarrassment. Impossible to deal with any of this. The only practical thing was to ignore it (but for how long was that practical, in fact?) and to double down, for now, on the desperate, unconsoling fiction that all of this was just a minor difference of opinion, like not quite seeing eye-to-eye over a neighbour’s choice of colour scheme or the merits of a particular TV show.”

 

“Benjamin had always assumed that he would grow old and die at home; that he was bound to end his life by returning to the country of his childhood. But he was starting to understand, at last, that this place had only ever existed in his imagination.”

“I like the rain before it falls. of course there is no such thing, she said. That’s why it’s my favorite. Something can still make you happy, can’t it, even if it isn’t real.”

 

“Yes – I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m sure I could repeat them perfectly.”

 

“We say, ‘Shall we meet for a drink?’, as though drinking were the main end of the appointment, and the matter of company only incidental, we are so shy about admitting our need for one another. We say, ‘Would you like to come for some coffee?’, as though it were less frightening to acknowledge that we are heavily dependent on mildly stimulating drinks, than to acknowledge that we are at all dependent on the companionship of other people.”

 

“[…] words are tricky little bastards, and very rarely say what you want them to say […]”

 

“Politics can make people do terrible things.”

 

My Take

I picked up Middle England at random from Overdrive when I needed a new audiobook to listen to and was very pleasantly surprised.  Author Jonathan Coe is a gifted writer who not only paints a portrait of fascinating individuals, but also of a whole nation.  Middle England gave me a great feel for the sensibilities of modern Britain.

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450. The Institute

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Stephen King

Genre:   Fiction, Horror, Thriller, Fantasy

561 pages, published September 10, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the middle of the night, twelve year old Luke Ellis is kidnapped from his house in suburban Minneapolis and his parents are murdered.  Luke wakes up in a bizarre facility known as The Institute which imprisons kids like him with special powers including telepathy and telekinesis.  Luke’s mission is to escape from The Institute.

Quotes 

“Great events turn on small hinges.”

 

“He wanted to tell Luke that he loved him. But there were no words, and maybe no need of them. Or telepathy. Sometimes a hug was telepathy.”

 

“It came to him, with the force of a revelation, that you had to have been imprisoned to fully understand what freedom was.”

 

“It was so simple, but it was a revelation: what you did for yourself was what gave you the power.”

 

“There was an abyss. And books contained magical incantations to raise what was hidden there, all the great mysteries.”

 

“It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens.”

 

“Seventy years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were obliterated by atomic bombs, the world is still here even though many nations have atomic weapons, even though primitive human emotions still hold sway over rational thought and superstition masquerading as religion still guides the course of human politics.”

 

My Take

Another quick-moving, compelling read by Stephen King.  Not his best work, but very enjoyable nonetheless.  Perfect escapism for a vacation.

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448. In the Unlikely Event

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Judy Blume

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

402 pages, published June 2, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In the Unlikely Event takes place in Elizabeth, New Jersey during the early 1950’s when two airplanes crash, killing most of the passengers and explores the impact on the community and several of the residents.  It is also a time capsule, capturing a slice of America during that innocent time.

Quotes 

“Life is a series of unlikely events, isn’t it? Hers certainly is. One unlikely event after another, adding up to a rich, complicated whole. And who knows what’s still to come?”

 

“Anything could go wrong any day of the week. What’s the point of worrying in advance?” “How do you stop yourself from worrying?” “I think of all the good things in my life.” “What about the bad things?” “There’s no room for them inside my head. Not anymore. Now I say live and let live, and I kick those other thoughts away. You can do that, too.”

 

“When Miri asked if she believed in God, what was she supposed to say? ‘Of course I believe in God,’ she’d told her.  ‘But how could God let such a terrible thing happen?’ ‘It’s not God’s job to decide what happens,’ she’d said. ‘It’s his job to help you through it.”

 

“Not that memories were enough—they didn’t keep you warm on a cold winter’s night. They couldn’t hold you when you were frightened or sad. But they were better than nothing.”

 

My Take

I liked, but did not love, In the Unlikely Event.  As a tween and teenager, I read all of Judy Blume’s books and have fond memories of them.  I think she is a terrific young adult writer, able to really connect with her audience.  This book was enjoyable to read, but also pretty forgettable.  Blume does, however, do a pretty good job of capturing the early 1950’s era.

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445. Recursion

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Blake Crouch

Genre:   Fiction, Science Fiction, Thriller

336 pages, published June 11, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

New York City cop Barry Sutton is perplexed as he investigates the devastating phenomenon the media has dubbed False Memory Syndrome, a mysterious affliction that drives its victims mad with memories of a life they never lived.  Helena Smith has dedicated her life to research that will let us re-experience our most precious memories.  When Helena invents a technology that lets us re-set time and start over, she intersects with Barry and they team up to save the world from destroying itself.

Quotes 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human – the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.”

“He has wondered lately if that’s all living really is—one long goodbye to those we love.”

 

“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. —SØREN KIERKEGAARD”

 

“There are so few things in our existence we can count on to give us the sense of permanence, of the ground beneath our feet. People fail us. Our bodies fail us. We fail ourselves. He’s experienced all of that. But what do you cling to, moment to moment, if memories can simply change. What, then, is real? And if the answer is nothing, where does that leave us?”

 

“Time is an illusion, a construct made out of human memory. There’s no such thing as the past, the present, or the future. It’s all happening now.”

 

“I think balance is for people who don’t know why they’re here.”

 

“He thinks perhaps there’s a reason our memories are kept hazy and out of focus. Maybe their abstraction serves as an anesthetic, a buffer protecting us from the agony of time and all that it steals and erases.”

 

“He has made peace with the idea that part of life is facing your failures, and sometimes those failures are people you once loved.”

 

“He thinks how it will be winter soon, and then another year gone by and another one on the chopping block, time flowing faster and faster. Life is nothing how he expected it would be when he was young and living under the delusion that things could be controlled. Nothing can be controlled. Only endured.”

 

“This low point isn’t the book of your life. It’s just a chapter.”

 

“My soul knows your soul. In any time.”

 

“In high school, in college, she was encouraged again and again to find her passion-a reason to get out of bed and breathe. In her experience, few people ever found that raison d’etre.

What teachers and professors never told her was about the dark side of finding your purpose. The part where it consumes you. Where it becomes a destroyer of relationship and happiness. And still, she wouldn’t trade it. This is the only person she knows how to be.”

 

“Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”

 

“Life with a cheat code isn’t life. Our existence isn’t something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain. That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other.”

 

“Is this what you want? To drop yourself into a still-life painting of a memory because life has broken your heart?”

 

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”

 

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”

 

“But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.”

 

“The three most important people in her life are gone, and she will never see them again. The stark loneliness of that knowledge cuts her to the bone.

She is forty-nine, and she wonders if this is what feeling old really means — not just a physical deterioration, but an interpersonal. A growing silence caused by the people you most love, who have shaped you and defined your world, going on ahead into whatever comes after.”

 

“Consciousness is a result of environment. Our cognitions – our idea of reality – are shaped by what we can perceive, by the limitations of our senses.”

 

“She realizes that children are always too young and self-absorbed to really see their parents in the prime of their lives.”

 

My Take

I found Recursion to be a highly engaging and fascinating read.  While it stands on its own as a SciFi thriller, author Blake Crouch also has a lot of interesting things to say about time and memory and the role they play in making us who we are.  Recommended.

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440. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   David Epstein

Genre:   Nonfiction, Business, Psychology, Self Improvement, Science

352 pages, published May 28, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Range, author David Epstein takes on the accepted wisdom that the key to success in most fields involves singular focus from a young age combined with thousands of hours of deliberate practice, i.e. the 10,000 hour rule immortalized in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.  Think Tiger Woods or Mozart.  Epstein takes a contrarian view and explores the view that the most effective path to success is to dabble and/or delay.  He looks at research on the world’s top performers, from professional athletes to Nobel laureates, and shows that early specialization is the exception, not the rule. Inventors who cross domains and engage in multiple disciplines have the greatest impact.  Range makes the case that failing is the best way to learn and shows that frequent quitters end up with the most fulfilling careers.

Quotes 

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“If we treated careers more like dating, nobody would settle down so quickly.”

 

“Modern work demands knowledge transfer: the ability to apply knowledge to new situations and different domains. Our most fundamental thought processes have changed to accommodate increasing complexity and the need to derive new patterns rather than rely only on familiar ones.  Our conceptual classification schemes provide a scaffolding for connecting knowledge, making it accessible and flexible.”

 

“Whether chemists, physicists, or political scientists, the most successful problem solvers spend mental energy figuring out what type of problem they are facing before matching a strategy to it, rather than jumping in with memorized procedures.”

 

“Like chess masters and firefighters, premodern villagers relied on things being the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They were extremely well prepared for what they had experienced before, and extremely poorly equipped for everything else. Their very thinking was highly specialized in a manner that the modern world has been telling us is increasingly obsolete. They were perfectly capable of learning from experience, but failed at learning without experience. And that is what a rapidly changing, wicked world demands—conceptual reasoning skills that can connect new ideas and work across contexts. Faced with any problem they had not directly experienced before, the remote villagers were completely lost. That is not an option for us. The more constrained and repetitive a challenge, the more likely it will be automated, while great rewards will accrue to those who can take conceptual knowledge from one problem or domain and apply it in an entirely new one.”

 

“You have people walking around with all the knowledge of humanity on their phone, but they have no idea how to integrate it. We don’t train people in thinking or reasoning.”

 

“The challenge we all face is how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.”

 

“The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, and where breakthroughs were more reliably produced when the unexpected arose.”

 

“breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. That is, the more contexts in which something is learned, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to a situation they’ve never seen before, which is the essence of creativity.”

 

“Whether or not experience inevitably led to expertise, they agreed, depended entirely on the domain in question. Narrow experience made for better chess and poker players and firefighters, but not for better predictors of financial or political trends, or of how employees or patients would perform.”

 

“While it is undoubtedly true that there are areas that require individuals with Tiger’s precocity and clarity of purpose, as complexity increases—as technology spins the world into vaster webs of interconnected systems in which each individual only sees a small part—we also need more Rogers: people who start broad and embrace diverse experiences and perspectives while they progress. People with range.”

 

“First act and then think…We discover the possibilities by doing, by trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models.” We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

 

“A separate, international team analyzed more than a half million research articles, and classified a paper as “novel” if it cited two other journals that had never before appeared together. Just one in ten papers made a new combination, and only one in twenty made multiple new combinations. The group tracked the impact of research papers over time. They saw that papers with new knowledge combinations were more likely to be published in less prestigious journals, and also much more likely to be ignored upon publication. They got off to a slow start in the world, but after three years, the papers with new knowledge combos surpassed the conventional papers, and began accumulating more citations from other scientists. Fifteen years after publication, studies that made multiple new knowledge combinations were way more likely to be in the top 1 percent of most-cited papers. To recap: work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge is less likely to be funded, less likely to appear in famous journals, more likely to be ignored upon publication, and then more likely in the long run to be a smash hit in the library of human knowledge.”

 

My Take

I enjoy reading books that challenge long held assumptions and Range falls squarely into that camp.  I have long believed the conventional wisdom that early focus, repetitive practice and hyper specialization were the road to success.  However, author David Epstein makes a compelling case, backed up with data, that the road to greatness is often a meandering one, with failure, course changes and a broad range of interdisciplinary influences rating as essential elements.  In reading this book, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci, the biography of the iconic artist and inventor who drew on a wide range of influences for some of his most creative and groundbreaking work.

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430. The Girl with Seven Names: A North Korean Defector’s Story

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Jancy Campbell

Author:    Hyeonseo Lee

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Foreign

304 pages, published July 2, 2015

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Girl with Seven Names is written by Hyeonseo Lee and tells the incredibly story of her escape from North Korea and her efforts to get her mother and brother out twelve years later.

Quotes 

“I hope you remember that if you encounter an obstacle on the road, don’t think of it as an obstacle at all… think of it as a challenge to find a new path on the road less traveled.”

 

“This is when I understood that we can do without almost anything – our home, even our country. But we will never do without other people, and we will never do without family.”

 

“After years in the Chinese workforce, I had developed an emotional attachment to money. My earnings were my hard work and long hours; my savings were comforts deferred.”

 

“Kindness toward strangers is rare in North Korea. There is risk in helping others. The irony was that by forcing us to be good citizens, the state made accusers and informers of us all.”

 

“Kind people who put others before themselves would be the first to die. It was the ruthless and the selfish who would survive.”

 

“I had to learn Mandarin. And I had the best teacher – necessity. You can study a language for years at school, but nothing helps you succeed like need, and mine was clear, and urgent.”

 

“Dictatorships may seem strong and unified, but they are always weaker than they appear.”

 

“Among the 27,000 North Koreans in the South, two kinds of life have been left behind: the wretched life of persecution and hunger, and the manageable life that was not so bad. People in the first group adjust rapidly. Their new life, however challenging, could only be better. For the people in the second group, life in the South is far more daunting. It often makes them yearn for the simpler, more ordered existence they left behind, where big decisions are taken for them by the state, and where life is not a fierce competition.”

 

“One of the main reasons that distinctions between oppressor and victim are blurred in North Korea is that no one there has any concept of rights. To know that your rights are being abused, or that you are abusing someone else’s, you first have to know that you have them, and what they are.”

 

“One of the tragedies of North Korea is that everyone wears a mask, which they let slip at their peril.”

 

“North Koreans who have never left don’t think critically because they have no point of comparison – with previous governments, different policies, or with other societies in the outside world.”

 

“Not only did I believe that humans were selfish and base, I also knew that plenty of them were actually bad – content to destroy lives for their own gain. I’d seen Korean-Chinese expose North Korean escapees to the police in return for money. I’d known people who’d been trafficked by other humans as if they were livestock. That world was familiar to me. All my life, random acts of kindness had been so rare that they’d stick in my memory, and I’d think: how strange.”

 

“As many discover, freedom – real freedom, in which your life is what you make of it and the choices are your own – can be terrifying.”

 

“North Korea is an atheist state. Anyone caught in possession of a Bible faces execution or a life in the gulag. Kim worship is the only permitted outlet for spiritual fervour. Shamans and fortune-tellers, too, are outlawed, but high cadres of the regime consult them. We’d heard that even Kim Jong-il himself sought their advice.”

 

My Take

The Girl with Seven Names is an informative and inspirational story by Hyeonseo Lee who escaped from North Korea and then got her mother and brother out.  Lee suffered many setbacks and overcame some impossible obstacles, but her perseverance and grit ultimately paid off.  In addition to a compelling personal story, I also learned a lot about the horrific country of North Korea.

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428. Lab Girl

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:  Hope Jahren

Genre:   Nonfiction, Science, Memoir

290 pages, published March 1, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

Lab Girl is written by acclaimed scientist and geobiologist Hope Jahren who has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil.  Jahren writes about both her long, difficult journey to become a world renowned scientist and insights from her botanical experiments.

Quotes 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life.”

 

“Working in the hospital teaches you that there are only two kinds of people in the world: the sick and the not sick. If you are not sick, shut up and help.”

 

“Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to

  1. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that

waited.”

 

“A CACTUS DOESN’T LIVE in the desert because it likes the desert; it lives there because the desert hasn’t killed it yet.”

 

“Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.”

 

“We love each other because we can’t help it. We don’t work at it and we don’t sacrifice for it. It is easy and all the sweeter to me because it is so undeserved. I discover within a second context that when something just won’t work, moving heaven and earth often won’t make it work — and similarly, there are some things that you just can’t screw up. I know that I could live without him: I have my own work, my own mission, and my own money. But I don’t want to. I really don’t want to. We make plans: he will share his strength with me and I will share my imagination with him…”

 

“I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.”

 

“No risk is more terrifying than that taken by the first root. A lucky root will eventually find water, but its first job is to anchor — to anchor an embryo and forever end its mobile phase, however passive that mobility was. Once the first root is extended, the plant will never again enjoy any hope (however feeble) of relocating to a place less cold, less dry, less dangerous. Indeed, it will face frost, drought, and greedy jaws without any possibility of flight. The tiny rootlet has only once chance to guess what the future years, decades — even centuries — will bring to the patch of soil where it sits. It assesses the light and humidity of the moment, refers to its programming, and quite literally takes the plunge.”

 

“My true potential had more to do with my willingness to struggle than with my past and present circumstances.”

 

“Being paid to wonder seems like a heavy responsibility at times.”       

 

“The leaves of the world comprise countless billion elaborations of a single, simple machine designed for one job only – a job upon which hinges humankind. Leaves make sugar. Plants are the only things in the universe that can make sugar out of nonliving inorganic matter. All the sugar that you have ever eaten was first made within a leaf. Without a constant supply of glucose to your brain, you will die. Period. Under duress, your liver can make glucose out of protein or fat – but that protein or fat was originally constructed from a plant sugar within some other animal. It’s inescapable: at this very moment, within the synapses of your brain, leaves are fueling thoughts of leaves.”

 

 

“After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed (Nelumbo nucifera) and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now.”

 

“Science has taught me that everything is more complicated than we first assume, and that being able to derive happiness from discovery is a recipe for a beautiful life. It has also convinced me that carefully writing everything down is the only real defense we have against forgetting something important that once was and is no more, including the spruce tree that should have outlived me but did not.”

 

“I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can. Such recurrent pronouncements have forced me to accept that because I am a female scientist, nobody knows what the hell I am, and it has given me the delicious freedom to make it up as I go along. I don’t take advice from my colleagues, and I try not to give it. When I am pressed, I resort to these two sentences: You shouldn’t take this job too seriously. Except for when you should.”

 

“A seed is alive while it waits. Every acorn on the ground is just as alive as the three-hundred-year-old oak tree that towers over it. Neither the seed nor the old oak is growing; they are both just waiting. Their waiting differs, however, in that the seed is waiting to flourish while the tree is only waiting to die.”

 

“America says it loves science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it.”

 

“Plants are not like us. They are different in critical and fundamental ways. As I catalog the differences between plants and animals, the horizon stretches out before me faster than I can travel and forces me to acknowledge that perhaps I was destined to study plants for decades only in order to more fully appreciate that they are beings we can never truly understand. Only when we begin to grasp this deep otherness can we be sure we are no longer projecting ourselves onto plants. Finally we can begin to recognize what is actually happening.  Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood…”

 

My Take

Lab Girl is an informative, interesting and inspirational memoir by the talented scientist/writer Hope Jahren.  Jahren had to overcome a lot of obstacles and endure some tough times before receiving recognition for her work as a geobiologist, but she would not have chosen any other path.  I especially enjoyed reading about her relationship with the idiosyncratic Bill Hagopian, a true American original, Jahren’s career long scientist sidekick.

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421. The Dutch House

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Clare Telleen

Author:   Ann Patchett

Genre:   Fiction, Historical Fiction

337 pages, published September 24, 2019

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Dutch House is a book about a family that purchases an unusual and luxurious estate in the suburbs of Philadelphia in the late 1940’s.  The house proves to be the undoing of the family.  The story is told by the son Danny, as he and his older sister Maeve are exiled from the Dutch house by their stepmother after their father unexpectedly dies.  Set over the course of five decades, The Dutch House tells the story of Danny and Maeve as they struggle to rise above their past.

Quotes 

“I see the past as it actually was,” Maeve said. She was looking at the trees.  But we overlay the present onto the past. “We look back through the lens of what we know now, so we’re not seeing it as the people we were, we’re seeing it as the people we are, and that means the past has been radically altered.”

 

“Do you think it’s possible to ever see the past as it actually was?”

 

“And so I made the decision to change. It might seem like change was impossible, given my nature and my age, but I understood exactly what there was to lose. It was chemistry all over again. The point wasn’t whether or not I liked it. The point was it had to be done.”

 

“The dinner was a huge production, with kids stashed in the den to eat off card tables like a collection of understudies who dreamed of one day breaking into the dining room.”

 

“Fluffy always said there was no greater luxury for a woman than to have a window over the sink.”

 

“Thinking about the past impeded my efforts to be decent in the present.”

 

“The biggest lie in business is that it takes money to make money, remember that. You gotta be smart, have a plan, pay attention to what’s going on around you. None of that costs a dime.”

 

“We were all so young, you know. We were still our best selves.”

 

“That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.”

 

“Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we has lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost has been taken from us by the person who still lived inside…”

 

“There would never been an end to all the things I wished I’d asked my father.”

 

“Celeste and I had made a few halfhearted attempts to get the kids to church when they were young, and then we gave up and left them in bed. In the city of constant stimulation, we had failed to give them the opportunity to develop strong inner lives for those occasions when they would find themselves sitting through the second act of The Nutcracker.”

 

“You have to serve those who need to be served, not just the ones who make you feel good about yourself.”

 

“Maeve, speak up. Don’t expect that anyone will do you the favor of listening if you don’t trouble yourself to use your voice.”

 

My Take

I listened to the audio version of The Dutch House and really enjoyed the narration by Tom Hanks.  I have read several books by Ann Patchett (Commonwealth and State of Wonder) and have a lot of respect for her as a writer.  The Dutch House tells a compelling story about a brother and sister and how they cope with some really bad curve balls thrown at them by life.

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399. The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Mike Brady

Author:   Michio Kaku

Genre:    Nonfiction, Science, Technology

368 pages, published February 20, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book on Overdrive

Summary

The Future of Humanity focuses on human space travel and colonization of other planets.  Futurist Michio Kaku explores how developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology could enable us to build habitable cities on Mars, nearby stars might be reached by microscopic spaceships sailing through space on laser beams, and technology might one day allow us to transcend our physical bodies entirely and achieve immortality.

Quotes 

“I sometimes think about how easy it is for a nation to slip into complacency and ruin after decades of basking in the sun. Since science is the engine of prosperity, nations that turn their backs on science and technology eventually enter a downward spiral.”

 

“Do we have enough food to feed the people of the world as they become middle class consumers? The hundreds of millions of people in China and India who are now entering the middle class watch Western movies and want to emulate that lifestyle, with its wasteful use of resources, large consumption of meat, big houses, fixation on luxury goods, et cetera. He is concerned we may not have enough resources to feed the population as a whole, and certainly would have difficulty feeding those who want to consume a Western diet.”

 

“Claude Shannon, the father of information theory, once declared, “I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans, and I’m rooting for the machines.”

 

“It’s easy to imagine that, in the future, telepathy and telekinesis will be the norm; we will interact with machines by sheer thought. Our mind will be able to turn on the lights, activate the internet, dictate letters, play video games, communicate with friends, call for a car, purchase merchandise, conjure any movie-all just by thinking. Astronauts of the future may use the power of their minds to pilot their spaceships or explore distant planets. Cities may rise from the desert of Mars, all due to master builders who mentally control the work of robots.”

 

“One reason why childhood lasts so long is because there is so much subtle information to absorb about human society and the natural world.”

 

“An even more advanced form of uploading your mind into a computer was envisioned by computer scientist Hans Moravec. When I interviewed him, he claimed that his method of uploading the human mind could even be done without losing consciousness. First you would be placed on a hospital gurney, next to a robot. Then a surgeon would take individual neurons from your brain and create a duplicate of these neurons (made of transistors) inside the robot. A cable would connect these transistorized neurons to your brain. As time goes by, more and more neurons are removed from your brain and duplicated in the robot. Because your brain is connected to the robot brain, you are fully conscious even as more and more neurons are replaced by transistors. Eventually, without losing consciousness, your entire brain and all its neurons are replaced by transistors. Once all one hundred billion neurons have been duplicated, the connection between you abd the artificial brain is finally cut. When you gaze back at the stretcher, you see your body, lacking its brain, while your consciousness now exists inside a robot.”

 

“If we scan all the life-forms that have ever existed on the Earth, from microscopic bacteria to towering forests, lumbering dinosaurs, and enterprising humans, we find that more than 99.9 percent of them eventually became extinct. This means that extinction is the norm, that the odds are already stacked heavily against us. When we dig beneath our feet into the soil to unearth the fossil record, we see evidence of many ancient life-forms. Yet only the smallest handful survive today. Millions of species have appeared before us; they had their day in the sun, and then they withered and died. That is the story of life.”

 

My Take

As a lifelong lover of science fiction and futurism, The Future of Humanity was an fascinating read for me.  Kaku writes about lots of interesting ideas in a manner that is accessible to the lay reader.  I also learned a lot.

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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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