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339. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Maxwell King

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, Psychology

416 pages, published September 4, 2018

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

The Good Neighbor is a biography of an American original, Fred Rogers (1928–2003), known and beloved by millions of children as Mr. Rogers.   In addition to creating his iconic children’s show, Fred was intensely devoted to children and their needs for understanding, compassion, equality, and kindness. Using original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, author Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work.

Quotes 

“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”

 

“Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.”

 

“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”

 

“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”

 

“The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

 

“Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

 

“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.”

 

“It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”

 

“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.”

 

“In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.” Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

 

“For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.”

 

“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”

 

“There are, essentially, two compelling reasons why I believe the reading public should care about Fred and his work: First, he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. No one better understood how essential it is for proper social, emotional, cognitive, and language development to take place in the first few years of life. And no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education. Second, he provided, and continues to provide, exemplary moral leadership. Fred Rogers advanced humanistic values because of his belief in Christianity, but his spirituality was completely eclectic; he found merit in all faiths and philosophies. His signature value was human kindness; he lived it and he preached it, to children, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of us everywhere who could take the time to listen.”

 

“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.” 

My Take

The mark of a good biography or memoir is after you finish reading it, you feel like you have a deep understanding of the person who is a subject.  This is definitely the case of The Good Neighbor.   Author Maxwell King does a superlative job of conveying not just the biographical facts of Fred Rogers’ life (which are interesting in and of themselves, e.g. he hated Dartmouth and transferred away from there as soon he could), but essence of the man himself.  You leave the book understanding what made Mr. Rogers tick and with a lot of respect and admiration for the life he lived.

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309. Upstairs at the White House: My Life with the First Ladies

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Katy Fassett

Author:   J.B. West, Mary Lynn Kotz

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Memoir, Biography

398 pages, published June 21, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

Upstairs at the White House is a behind the scenes chronicle of the first families during the Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Nixon administrations told by Head Usher J.B. West who served in the White House for 28 years.  West offers fly on the wall observations of the personalities, victories, challenges, and the times of each President he served as well as their wives, and children (as well as houseguests–including friends, relatives, and heads of state).

Quotes 

“The secret was loyalty to the White House and to the Presidency, rather than to whoever happens to be occupying the office for four years, or eight.”

 

“The staff did have a little difficulty adjusting to Mr. Churchill’s way of living. The first thing in the morning, he declined the customary orange juice and called for a drink of Scotch. His staff, a large entourage of aides and a valet, followed suit. The butlers wore a path in the carpet carrying trays laden with brandy to his suite. We got used to his “jumpsuit,” the extraordinary one-piece uniform he wore every day, but the servants never quite got over seeing him naked in his room when they’d go up to serve brandy. It was the jumpsuit or nothing. In his room, Mr. Churchill wore no clothes at all most of the time during the day.”

 

“It took twenty big army trucks, jam-packed to the corners, to move the Roosevelts’ monumental twelve-year collection of possessions out of the White House. We packed night and day, for one entire week.”

 

“The next evening, Fields, his pride hurt, dumped two big splashes of bourbon over the ice and served it to Mrs. Truman. She tasted the drink. Then she beamed. “Now that’s the way we like our old-fashioneds!”

 

“There’s just one thing I draw the line at,” he said, “and that’s any kind of attack on my family. Any man can make mistakes, even if he’s trying with all his heart and mind to do the best thing for his country. But a man’s family ought to be sacred. There was one columnist who wrote some lie about my family when I was in the Senate and instead of writing him a letter I called him on the phone and I said you so-and-so, if you say another word about my family, I’ll come down to your office and shoot you.”

 

“The Trumans did not reserve fancy entertaining only for the great or near-great. They catered also to their old friends, who had never had an appointment with destiny.”

 

“I have but one career, and its name is Ike,” Mrs. Eisenhower once announced.” 

My Take

I found Upstairs at the White House to be a fascinating inside look at the personal lives of five twentieth century Presidents and their families.  The time period covered (World War II through the Vietnam war) was one of the most tumultuous in American history and West offers a unique, unparalleled view of it.  I especially enjoyed his description of Winston Churchill clothing habits while visiting FDR.  For Winston it was either his one piece jumpsuit or nudity as several unassuming members of the White House staff discovered.

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289. Leonardo da Vinci

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Chris Funk

Author:   Walter Isaacson

Genre:  Non Fiction, Biography, History, Art, Science

600 pages, published October 17, 2017

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Leonardo da Vinci, noted biographer Walter Isaacson (who also wrote biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin) delves into the incredible life, art, and scientific discoveries of history’s most creative genius, Leonardo da Vinci.  This biography on thousands of pages from Leonardo’s notebooks and new discoveries about the master’s life and work.  Isaacson makes the case that Leonardo’s genius was based on skills Leonardo had in abundance that we can improve in ourselves such as passionate curiosity, careful observation, and a playful imagination.  One of history’s most famous artists, Leonardo’s The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa are the two most famous paintings in history.  However, as a noted polymath, Leonardo’s genius also extended to numerous scientific and technological discoveries.   With an obsessive passion, his studies included anatomy, fossils, birds, the heart, flying machines, botany, geology, and weaponry.  Leonardo’s combining of diverse passions fueled his incredible creativity, as did his outsider, avant guard nature.  His life reminds us of the importance of curiosity and questioning the world.

Quotes 

“Vision without execution is hallucination. .. Skill without imagination is barren. Leonardo [da Vinci] knew how to marry observation and imagination, which made him history’s consummate innovator.”

 

“There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.”

 

“men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind.”

 

“Leonardo became known in Milan not only for his talents but also for his good looks, muscular build, and gentle personal style. “He was a man of outstanding beauty and infinite grace,” Vasari said of him. “He was striking and handsome, and his great presence brought comfort to the most troubled soul.”

 

“If we want to be more like Leonardo, we have to be fearless about changing our minds based on new information.”

 

“His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a century later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.”

 

“Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division. His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation. He had an imagination so excitable that it flirted with the edges of fantasy, which is also something we can try to preserve in ourselves and indulge in our children.”

 

“But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.”

 

“The tongue of a woodpecker can extend more than three times the length of its bill. When not in use, it retracts into the skull and its cartilage-like structure continues past the jaw to wrap around the bird’s head and then curve down to its nostril. In addition to digging out grubs from a tree, the long tongue protects the woodpecker’s brain. When the bird smashes its beak repeatedly into tree bark, the force exerted on its head is ten times what would kill a human. But its bizarre tongue and supporting structure act as a cushion, shielding the brain from shock.1 There is no reason you actually need to know any of this. It is information that has no real utility for your life, just as it had none for Leonardo. But I thought maybe, after reading this book, that you, like Leonardo, who one day put “Describe the tongue of the woodpecker” on one of his eclectic and oddly inspiring to-do lists, would want to know. Just out of curiosity. Pure curiosity.”

 

“Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely. In his notebook, he described his method—almost like a trick—for closely observing a scene or object: look carefully and separately at each detail. He compared it to looking at the page of a book, which is meaningless when taken in as a whole and instead needs to be looked at word by word. Deep observation must be done in steps: “If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.” 

My Take

Leonardo da Vinci’s genius, artistry, creativity and insatiable curiosity are thoroughly explored and illuminated in Walter Isaacson’s engrossing book.  Not only did I learn quite a lot about the fascinating Leonardo, but I also learned a lot about the Renaissance, Florence, painting, science and technology as well as Leonardo’s difficult relationship with Michelangelo.  I will be in Florence this summer and look forward to seeing in person many of the things that I read about in Isaacson’s Leonardo da Vinci.

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286. Alexander Hamilton

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Ron Chernow

Genre:  Non Fiction, History, Biography, Politics

818 pages, published March 29, 2005

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

As the title suggests, the book is a biography of Alexander Hamilton, the founding father who had a tremendous influence on shaping the newly created United States.   Author Ron Chernow conveys a compelling tale of a man who started life as a bastard as a orphan in the West Indies to become George Washington’s aide-de-camp in the Continental Army, coauthor of The Federalist Papers, founder of the Bank of New York, leader of the Federalist Party, and the first Treasury Secretary of the United States.  This biography makes the case that the political and economic greatness of today’s America is the result of Hamilton’s numerous sacrifices to champion ideas that were often hotly disputed during his time.

Quotes 

“Perseverance in almost any plan is better than fickleness and fluctuation. (Alexander Hamilton, July 1792)”

 

“Americans often wonder how this moment could have spawned such extraordinary men as Hamilton and Madison. Part of the answer is that the Revolution produced an insatiable need for thinkers who could generate ideas and wordsmiths who could lucidly expound them. The immediate utility of ideas was an incalculable tonic for the founding generation. The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.”

 

“Hamilton, the human word machine.”

 

“In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.”

 

“If we must have an enemy at the head of government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible.”

 

“The law is whatever is successfully argued and plausibly maintained.”         

 

“As too much power leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people.”

 

“Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.”

 

“Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism.”

 

“He had learned a lesson about propaganda in politics and mused wearily that “no character, however upright, is a match for constantly reiterated attacks, however false.” If a charge was made often enough, people assumed in the end “that a person so often accused cannot be entirely innocent.”

 

“The American Revolution was to succeed because it was undertaken by skeptical men who knew that the same passions that toppled tyrannies could be applied to destructive ends.”

 

“Many of these slaveholding populists were celebrated by posterity as tribunes of the common people. Meanwhile, the self-made Hamilton, a fervent abolitionist and a staunch believer in meritocracy, was villainized in American history textbooks as an apologist of privilege and wealth.”

 

“A prudent silence will frequently be taken for wisdom and a sentence or two cautiously thrown in will sometimes gain the palm of knowledge, while a man well informed but indiscreet and unreserved will not uncommonly talk himself out of all consideration and weight. (Alexander Hamilton’s ‘thesis on discretion’ written to his son James shortly before his fatal duel with Burr.)”

 

“If Jefferson provided the essential poetry of American political discourse, Hamilton established the prose of American statecraft.”

 

“With a ready tongue and rapier wit, Hamilton could wound people more than he realized, and he was so nimble in debate that even bright people sometimes felt embarrassingly tongue-tied in his presence.”

 

“The suspect nature of these stories can be seen in the anecdote Jefferson told of Hamilton visiting his lodging in 1792 and inquiring about three portraits on the wall. “They are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced,” Jefferson replied: “Sir Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke.” Hamilton supposedly replied, “The greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar.”

 

“The task of government was not to stop selfish striving—a hopeless task—but to harness it for the public good.”

 

“We have left behind the rosy agrarian rhetoric and slaveholding reality of Jeffersonian democracy and reside in the bustling world of trade, industry, stock markets, and banks that Hamilton envisioned. (Hamilton’s staunch abolitionism formed an integral feature of this economic vision.) He has also emerged as the uncontested visionary in anticipating the shape and powers of the federal government. At a time when Jefferson and Madison celebrated legislative power as the purest expression of the popular will, Hamilton argued for a dynamic executive branch and an independent judiciary, along with a professional military, a central bank, and an advanced financial system. Today, we are indisputably the heirs to Hamilton’s America, and to repudiate his legacy is, in many ways, to repudiate the modern world.” 

My Take

Given my interest in American founding, Alexander Hamilton was a pleasure to read.  Author Ron Chernow brings the man and the period to life and I learned a lot about one of the greatest men in our country’s history.  He is a truly inspirational figure, rising from obscurity as an illegitimate orphan from the Caribbean to become the key architect of federal power for a young United States.  I am seeing the Hamilton musical in a few months and am glad to have some background knowledge of the man on whom it is based.  A fascinating, highly recommended book, especially for those interested in American History.

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269. The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Mark Logue and Peter Conradi

Genre:  Non Fiction, Historical Fiction, Biography

242 pages, published November 1, 2010

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

The King’s Speech is the story of Lionel Logue, a speech therapist from Australia working in London, and King George VI (aka Bertie) of England, Logue’s most famous patient.  For several decades, Logue helped Prince Albert (who would become King George VI when his older brother, the Duke of Windsor, abdicated the English throne to marry Wallis Simpson) overcome a lifelong stammering problem.  In this historical novel, we learn how Logue accomplished this feat as well as a lot of British and Australian history from that era.

 

Quotes 

“When the fresh patient comes to me the usual query is: “Will I be able to speak like the King?” and my reply is: “Yes, if you will work like he does.”

 

“Every public speaker likes his hearer to imagine his oratory as an unpremeditated gift of nature, and not the result of prolonged and patient study.”

 

My Take

A few years ago, I saw the movie version of The King’s Speech and really enjoyed it.  I was, therefore, keen to read the novel upon which it was based.  Like the movie, I found the book to be a very interesting, behind the scenes peek into history.  I always like learning more about history, especially British history, and was pleased to learn more about King George VI , the Duke of Windsor and the pre-World War II period.

 

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239. The Lady in Gold: The Extraordinary Tale of Gustav Klimt’s Masterpiece, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Michael Koss

Author:  Anne-Marie O’Connor

Genre:  Non Fiction, Foreign, History, Art, Biography

370 pages, published February 7, 2012

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Lady in Gold tells the true story behind Austrian artist Gustav Klimt’s portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, known as the Austrian Mona Lisa.  The first part of the book delves into the history of Klimt, a wholly original, headstrong and intriguing figure, and of Adele Bloch-Bauer, a beautiful, free thinking, seductive Viennese woman from a prominent Jewish family who may have been the mistress of Klimt.  After Adele’s death, the Nazi’s marched into Austria and began a wholesale looting of artwork belonging to the country’s Jewish citizens.  One of the paintings they seized was “The Woman in Gold,” Klimt’s portrait of Adele.  Fifty years later, Adele’s niece Maria engaged Randol Schoenberg, a young lawyer related to a friend of hers to engage in an against all odds battle to recover the painting from the Austrian government.  The second part of the book recounts the legal battle which led to justice finally being served.

 

Quotes 

“Happy he who forgets what cannot be changed.”

 

“Any nonsense can attain importance by virtue of being believed by millions of people,” Einstein.

 

“to every age its art; to art its freedom.”

 

“Austrians were allowed to paper over their pasts and portray themselves as unwilling participants. They felt sorry for themselves, and for the proud family names sullied with the taint of Nazi collaboration. The Cold War began in earnest, and the West was eager to hang on to Austria. A 1948 amnesty brought a premature end to Austrian de-Nazification. Austrians began to deny their jubilant welcome of Hitler and to claim that Austria had been “occupied” by Germany.”

 

My Take

A few years ago, I watched the film version of The Lady in Gold (renamed The Woman in Gold) starring Helen Mirren as Maria and Ryan Reynolds as Randy Schoenberg.  It was a very well done, informative and entertaining movie that changed a few of the historical facts, but was otherwise true to the spirit of this fascinating story.  The book version goes several layers deeper and delivers an intriguing read.  As a side note, when I got to the part in the book when Randy Schoenberg (the lawyer played by Ryan Reynolds in the movie), I learned that he was at USC Law School a year before I was.  Sure enough, I googled an image of him and discovered that I remembered him from several classes that we both took.  Later in the book, it is revealed that Randy ended up with close to $100 million in connection with the recovery of The Lady in Gold painting.  Good for him!  Undoubtedly, the most successful of my USC Law School classmates.

 

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236. Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Tracy Kidder

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Biography, Medicine, Public Policy

333 pages, published August 31, 2004

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

 

Summary

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a biography of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Harvard educated doctor whose life’s mission is a quest to improve the health of the world’s impoverished people, with is the destitute plateau region of Haiti as his primary place of work.  Farmer has also worked in Peru, Cuba, and Russia.  In addition to humanitarian work, Farmer is a Harvard professor, renowned infectious-disease specialist, anthropologist, the recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, modern day Robin Hood.  Farmer and his compatriots focus on diagnosing and curing infectious diseases and bringing the lifesaving tools of modern medicine to those who need them most.

 

Quotes 

“And I can imagine Farmer saying he doesn’t care if no one else is willing to follow their example. He’s still going to make these hikes, he’d insist, because if you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you’re saying that their lives matter less than some others’, and the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that’s wrong with the world.”

 

“That’s when I feel most alive, he told me once on an airplane, when I’m helping people.”

 

“WL’s [White Liberals] think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.”

 

“Paul’s face grew serious. ‘I think whenever a people has enormous resources, it is easy for them to call themselves democratic. I think of myself more as a physician than an American. We belong to the nation of those who care for the sick. Americans are lazy democrats, and it is my belief, as someone who shares the same nationality as [a Russian doctor], I think the rich can always call themselves democratic, but the sick people are not among the rich […] I’m very proud to be an American. I have many opportunities because I’m American. I can travel freely through the world, I can start projects, but that’s called privilege, not democracy.”

 

“The goofiness of radicals thinking they have to dress in Guatemalan peasant clothes. The poor don’t want you to look like them. They want you to dress in a suit and go get them food and water. Comma.”

 

“I think Farmer taps into a universal anxiety and also into a fundamental place in some troubled consciences, into what he calls “ambivalence,” the often unacknowledged uneasiness that some of the fortunate feel about their place in the world, the thing he once told me he designed his life to avoid.”

 

“One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people cannot care, erase, not remember.”

 

“It is the curse of humanity that it learns to tolerate even the most horrible situations by habituation.” “Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.” “The physicians are the natural attorneys of the poor, and the social problems should largely be solved by them.”

 

“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. … You know, people from our background-like you, like most PIH-ers, like me-we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”

 

My Take

Mountains Beyond Mountains is a powerful book written by the very talented Tracy Kidder (a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for a different book) about the difference that one person can make with their life.  The title comes from the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains”: as you solve one problem, another problem presents itself, and so you go on and try to solve that one too.  That, in a nutshell, is the philosophy of Dr. Paul Farmer and it was very inspiring to see how it has played out in his life.

 

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127. The Zookeeper’s Wife

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:   Diane Ackerman

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

368 pages, published September 17, 2007

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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125. The Undoing Project

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:   Michael Lewis

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

362 pages, published December 6, 2016

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

My Take

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

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98. Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

Rating:  ☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  

Author:   Susan Orlean

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Biography, History, Animals

336 pages, published September 27, 2011

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

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

 

Quotes

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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