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564. The $64 Tomato

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Frank and Lisanne

Author:    William Alexander

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Environment, Food, Nature

304 pages, published March 2, 2007

Reading Format:   Book

Summary

Bill Alexander writes about his struggles to create an ideal garden on the acreage that comes with a house he and his wife buy in the Hudson River Valley of New York.  What follows is an adventure rivaling the Perils of Pauline.

Quotes 

“Gardening is, by its very nature, an expression of the triumph of optimism over experience. No matter how bad this year was, there’s always next year. Experience doesn’t count.”

 

“The great, terrifying existentialist question: If you were doomed to live the same life over and over again for eternity, would you choose the life you are living now? The question is interesting enough, but I’ve always thought the point of asking it is really the unspoken, potentially devastating follow-up question. That is, if the answer is no, then why are you living the life you are living now? Stop making excuses , and do something about it.”

 

“Environmentalists blame the farmers for overdosing with pesticides, and the farmers blame the consumers for demanding blemish-free fruit.”

 

 “One event is an anomaly, two is a coincidence, and three a pattern.”

 

“but I had set the precedent of declaring my preference for the solitary pleasures of gardening over social events.”

 

“Well, ah don’t weed; ah cultivate. (As it turns out, ah will cultivate a lot.) Whereas weeding evokes images of backbreaking labor, kneeling under a broad-brimmed hat while hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard, cultivating suggests nurturing, caring for tender shoots, feeding, and raising. All of which you accomplish, of course, by kneeling and hand-yanking weeds into a basket to be dumped in a remote corner of the yard.”

 

My Take

The $64 Tomato was a very fun read.  With acerbic and humorous anectdotes, author Bill Alexander brings to life his mighty struggles to create the perfect garden.  This book confirmed my life long aversion to the big garden and made me happy with the few potted herbs and plants that I maintain along with the volunteers who populate our outdoor mountain area.

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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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511. You’re Not Enough (and That’s Ok): Escaping the Toxic Culture of Self-Love

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Nick Reader

Author:   Alice Beth Stuckey

Genre:  Non Fiction, Memoir, Christian, Self Improvement

228 pages, published August 11, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In You’re Not Enough, mother, Christian, and conservative thought leader Alice Beth Stuckey questions the narrative that to be happy, fulfilled and successful all you need to do is love yourself.  She believes that down this path of self love lies disappointment and disillusionment.  Instead, she advocates taking the focus off of yourself and putting it on others and Jesus Christ.

Quotes 

“If the self is the source of our depression or despair or insecurity or fear, it can’t also be the source of our ultimate fulfillment.”

 

 “This is an argument I made in a podcast episode titled “Three Myths Christian Women Believe”. The first myth was that you are enough. My counter was this: you’re not enough, you’ll never be enough, and that’s okay, because God is.”

 

“But if we were really enough as is, we wouldn’t have to try so hard to convince ourselves it’s true.”

 

 “When we follow Christ, we are never at risk of “losing ourselves,” because our identity is eternally found in him.”

 “The yoke of the god of self is difficult and its burden heavy, but God’s yoke is easy and his burden light. What a relief to know we don’t have to expend our precious energy serving ourselves. We make terrible, unworthy gods.”

 

“Without the Bible as our basis for justice, we get a system based on the only tool we have without a supreme moral Lawgiver: the self.”

 

“Because the self can’t be both the problem and the solution.”

 

“The self isn’t enough—period. The answer to the purposelessness and hollowness we feel is found not in us but outside of us. The solutions to our problems and pain aren’t found in self-love, but in God’s love.”

 

“While self-love depletes, God’s love for us doesn’t. He showed us His love by sending Jesus to die for our sins so that we could be forgiven and live forever with Him. Self-love is superficial and temporary. God’s love is profound and eternal.”

 

My Take

I was given You’re Not Enough by my son Nick as a birthday gift.  It was my first encounter with the conservative, Christian personality Alice Beth Stuckey.  I found her book to be a quick read with an important idea at its core.  It reconfirmed to me how foolish it is to base your self worth on how you look, what you weigh, how much you achieve, or any other temporal basis.  Worth a read.

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507. The Best of Me

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Art Drake

Author:    David Sedaris

Genre:  Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Essays, Short Stories

387 pages, published November 3, 2020

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

The Best of Me is retrospective compilation of Humorist David Sedaris’ stories and essays from the past twenty-five years.

Quotes 

“A Dutch parent has a decidedly hairier story to relate, telling his children, “Listen, you might want to pack a few of your things together before going to bed. The former bishop of Turkey will be coming tonight along with six to eight black men. They might put some candy in your shoes, they might stuff you into a sack and take you to Spain, or they might just pretend to kick you. We don’t know for sure, but we want you to be prepared.”

 

“If you read an essay in Esquire and don’t like it, there could be something wrong with the essay. If it’s in The New Yorker, on the other hand, and you don’t like it, there’s something wrong with you.”

 

“It’s pathetic how much significance I attach to the Times puzzle, which is easy on Monday and gets progressively harder as the week advances. I’ll spend fourteen hours finishing the Friday, and then I’ll wave it in someone’s face and demand that he acknowledge my superior intelligence. I think it means that I’m smarter than the next guy, but all it really means is that I don’t have a life.”

 

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you’re offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone’s feelings”

 

“If you read someone else’s diary, you get what you deserve.”

 

“On Undecided Voter​s: “To put them in perspective, I think​ of being​ on an airplane.​ The flight attendant comes​ down the aisle​ with her food cart and, eventually,​ parks​ it beside my seat.​ “Can I inter​est you in the chick​en?​” she asks.​ “Or would​ you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broke​n glass​ in it?”  To be undecided in this elect​ion is to pause​ for a moment and then ask how the chick​en is cooked.”

 

“I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you’re bad he comes to your house and steals things.”

 

“Asking for candy on Halloween was called trick-or-treating, but asking for candy on November first was called begging, and it made people uncomfortable.”

 

“I often see people on the streets dressed as objects and handing out leaflets. I tend to avoid leaflets but it breaks my heart to see a grown man dressed as a taco. So, if there is a costume involved, I tend not only to accept the leaflet, but to accept it graciously, saying, “Thank you so much,” and thinking, You poor, pathetic son of a bitch. I don’t know what you have but I hope I never catch it.”

 

“On my fifth trip to France I limited myself to the words and phrases that people actually use. From the dog owners I learned “Lie down,” “Shut up,” and “Who shit on this carpet?” The couple across the road taught me to ask questions correctly, and the grocer taught me to count. Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. “Is thems the thoughts of cows?” I’d ask the butcher, pointing to the calves’ brains displayed in the front window. “I want me some lamb chop with handles on ’em.”

 

“When a hurricane damaged my father’s house, my brother rushed over with a gas grill, three coolers of beer, and an enormous Fuck-It Bucket – a plastic pail filled with jawbreakers and bite-size candy bars. (“When shit brings you down, just say ‘fuck it,’ and eat yourself some motherfucking candy.”

 

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

 

 “Hugh consoled me, saying, “Don’t let it get to you. There are plenty of things you’re good at.”

 

When asked for some examples, he listed vacuuming and naming stuffed animals. He says he can probably come up with a few more, but he’ll need some time to think.”

 

“At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

 

My Take

I have long been a fan of writer and humorist David Sedaris.  I was introduced to him back in the mid-90s when my husband Scot and I saw him read his essay The Santaland Diaries where he recounts with side splitting humor his time working as an elf at a major department store in New York.  If you haven’t read it, do so immediately.  The Best of Me, a collection of his best essays and stories, doesn’t include this classic gem which is a real shame.  I’ve read most of Sedaris’ books, including several reviewed on this website (Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls  and Calypso) and found them highly entertaining.  While there are many good choices included in The Best of Me, there are unfortunately some great essays and stories that were omitted.

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487. Nice Try: Stories of Best Intentions and Mixed Results

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Josh Gondelman

Genre:   Memoir, Humor

272 pages, published September 17, 2019

Reading Format:   Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Nice Try is a memoir of essays by Emmy Award-winning stand-up comic and humor writer Josh Gondelman.   Dubbed one of comedy’s true “nice guys,” Gondelman recounts stories from his childhood, adolescence, college, making in New York as a comic, dating and getting married.

Quotes 

“But if you’ve got a cheerful, friendly demeanor, people act like you don’t know better, like you’ve never heard of poverty or a broken bone. Optimists never get credit for the effort it takes to keep believing things are going to be okay. Here’s a secret: most optimists know the world is full of horrors. They just think it can be improved.”

 

“I tore through The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies in elementary school, my pretween brain vibrating with a mixture of titillation and pretension. Ahh, so many swears. Very grown-up, I would think. And Even on an island, I would know it is bad to murder a little boy with glasses, because I am a little boy with glasses.”

 

My Take

There are a few chuckles in Nice Try and Gondelman seems nice enough, but a week after reading it, there was little worth remembering.  The author also gets very preachy at times which was unnecessary and off-putting.

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477. Notes from a Small Island

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:  Bill Bryson

Genre:   Non Fiction, Travel, Foreign, Humor, Memoir, Essays

324 pages, published May 28, 1997

Reading Format:  Audiobook on Overdrive

Summary

Notes from a Small Island is author Bill Bryson’s take on the two decades that he spent living in the United Kingdom.

Quotes 

“I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.”

 

“Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – Marmite, village fetes, country lanes, people saying ‘mustn’t grumble’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but’, people apologizing to me when I conk them with a nameless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, stinging nettles, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, crumpets, hot-water bottles as a necessity, drizzly Sundays – every bit of it.  What a wondrous place this was – crazy as fuck, of course, but adorable to the tiniest degree. What other country, after all, could possibly have come up with place names like Tooting Bec and Farleigh Wallop, or a game like cricket that goes on for three days and never seems to start? Who else would think it not the least odd to make their judges wear little mops on their heads, compel the Speaker of the House of Commons to sit on something called the Woolsack, or take pride in a military hero whose dying wish was to be kissed by a fellow named Hardy? (‘Please Hardy, full on the lips, with just a bit of tongue.’) What other nation in the world could possibly have given us William Shakespeare, pork pies, Christopher Wren, Windsor Great Park, the Open University, Gardners’ Question Time and the chocolate digestive biscuit? None, of course.  How easily we lose sight of all this. What an enigma Britain will seem to historians when they look back on the second half of the twentieth century. Here is a country that fought and won a noble war, dismantled a mighty empire in a generally benign and enlightened way, created a far-seeing welfare state – in short, did nearly everything right – and then spent the rest of the century looking on itself as a chronic failure. The fact is that this is still the best place in the world for most things – to post a letter, go for a walk, watch television, buy a book, venture out for a drink, go to a museum, use the bank, get lost, seek help, or stand on a hillside and take in a view.  All of this came to me in the space of a lingering moment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. I like it here. I like it more than I can tell you.”

 

“The tearoom lady called me love. All the shop ladies called me love and most of the men called me mate. I hadn’t been here twelve hours and already they loved me.”

 

“Is it raining out?’ the reception girl asked brightly as I filled in the registration card between sneezes and pauses to wipe water from my face with the back of my arm. ‘No, my ship sank and I had to swim the last seven miles.”

 

“To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one’s mouth more or less continuously. Gratification, instant and lavish, is a birthright”

 

“…it occurred to me, not for the first time, what a remarkably small world Britain is. That is its glory, you see–that it manages at once to be intimate and small scale, and at the same time packed to bursting with incident and interest. I am constantly filled with admiration at this–at the way you can wander through a town like Oxford and in the space of a few hundred yards pass the home of Christopher Wren, the buildings where Halley found his comet and Boyle his first law, the track where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-four-minute mile, the meadow where Lewis Carroll strolled; or how you can stand on Snow’s Hill at Windsor and see, in a single sweep, Windsor Castle, the playing fields of Eton, the churchyard where Gray wrote his “Elegy,” the site where The Merry Wives of Windsor was performed. Can there anywhere on earth be, in such a modest span, a landscape more packed with centuries of busy, productive attainment?”

 

“When the Duke [W.J.C. Scott-Bentinck] died, his heirs found all of the aboveground rooms devoid of furnishings except for one chamber in the middle of which sat the Duke’s commode. The main hall was mysteriously floor less. Most of the rooms were painted pink. The one upstairs room in which the Duke had resided was packed to the ceiling with hundreds of green boxes, each of which contained a single dark brown wig. This was, in short, a man worth getting to know.”

 

“The fact is that the British have a totally private sense of distance. This is most visibly seen in the shared pretense that Britain is a lonely island in the middle of an empty green sea. Of course, the British are all aware, in an abstract sort of way, that there is a substantial landmass called Europe nearby and that from time to time it is necessary to go over there to give old Jerry a drubbing or have a holiday in the sun, but it’s not nearby in any meaningful sense in the way that, say, Disney World is.”

 

“It sometimes occurs to me that the British have more heritage than is good for them. In a country where there is so astonishingly much of everything, it is easy to look on it as a kind of inexhaustible resource.”

 

“I can never understand why Londoners fail to see that they live in the most wonderful city in the world. It is, if you ask me, far more beautiful and interesting than Paris and more lively than anywhere but New York—and even New York can’t touch it in lots of important ways. It has more history, finer parks, a livelier and more varied press, better theaters, more numerous orchestras and museums, leafier squares, safer streets, and more courteous inhabitants than any other large city in the world.”

 

“One day in 1987 Fallows was standing at a window in a London bank waiting to be served when a would-be robber named Douglas Bath stepped in front of him, brandished a handgun and demanded money from the cashier. Outraged, Fallows told Bath to ‘bugger off’ to the back of the line and wait his turn, to the presumed approving nods of others in the queue. Unprepared for this turn of events, Bath meekly departed from the bank empty-handed and was arrested a short distance away.”

 

My Take

Like Bryson, I am a committed Anglophile and agree with him that London is the best city on earth.  I enjoyed his insights and witticisms as he recounted the twenty years he spent living in the UK.  Reading this book made me want to plan another trip that special place.

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476. Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:

Author:   Candace Owens

Genre:   Non Fiction, Memoir, Politics, Public Policy

240 pages, published September 15, 2020

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

In Blackout, political activist and social media star Candace Owens tells the story of her personal evolution from left-wing Democrat to freedom loving Republican.  She also expands on her theme that Democrats can only win by keeping blacks in their place on the “Democrat Plantation.”  Owens elucidates the myriad ways that liberal policies and ideals are actually harm African Americans and hinder their ability to rise above poverty, live independent and successful lives, and be an active part of the American Dream.

Quotes 

“My challenge to every American is simple: reject the Left’s victim narrative and do it yourself. Because we will never realize the true potential that this incredible country has to offer—in the land of the free and the home of the brave—if we continue to be shackled by the great myth of government deliverance.”

 

“Leftism is defined as any political philosophy that seeks to infringe upon individual liberties in its demand for a higher moral good.”

 

“The personality complex of a liberal savior is one that fascinates me, as I believe it to be centered on extreme narcissism. I imagine them to be addicted to the feeling of accomplishment that is derived from helping someone inferior to them.”

 

“We so often hear the expression “freedom is not free,” but what exactly does that mean? It means that freedom isn’t a young woman in an open field with her head tilted toward the sun. It’s more likely a young woman sitting at home, studying, even though she’d much rather be out with her friends. It’s a young man, getting accepted into a highly ranked university on the basis of his outstanding academic performance. Freedom is personal responsibility. It’s the sacrifices we make personally so that we may afford our lives certain privileges. Ronald Reagan famously said, “Freedom is never more than a generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.”

 

“World War II. And just a little more than two decades before then marked the start of World War I, battles fought among men whose average age was twenty-four but reached as low as just twelve years. Fast-forward to today and students are demanding safe spaces on college campuses because they view it as a form of torture to be exposed to opposing viewpoints.”

 

“Conservatism then is about sense and survival. Leftism is the plaything of a society with too much time on its hands.”

 

“Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police,” Mac Donald wrote. “In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.”

 

“For those who believe that cop killings are simply due to excessive force, Cesario’s report contradicts that notion as well, revealing that between 90 and 95 percent of civilians who were killed by police officers were violently attacking either the cop or another person when they were killed. And while the media loves to report that blacks are repeatedly gunned down when their cell phone or another item is mistaken for a gun, these incidents are rare.”

 

“Our internal conflict is understandable—why shouldn’t the government, after years of slavery and Jim Crow, not eliminate black debt by subsidizing black housing, and otherwise funding black lives? The answer is simple: because a painkiller cannot eliminate cancer. No short-term fix, no Band-Aid over the deeply infected wound, will ever fix the underlying problems that plague our community.”

 

“It is unfathomable that black parents would continue to put their children’s future at risk by pledging allegiance to abysmal public schools when the option to drastically improve their educational circumstances sits before them. It is even more unfathomable that liberals would ask them to. Is it not ironic that the same people who claim the American workforce is racist and that black Americans have a harder time securing jobs and moving up the corporate ladder would at the same time do all they can to prevent workplace preparedness by advocating against the best available paths for education? It is too often the case that those with the loudest voices against school choice are the very same Democrats who send their own kids to private schools. Their astounding hypocrisy is evidence of a more sinister intention, I believe. Perhaps Democrats simply understand that uneducated black children transform into uneducated adults, and uneducated adults are far more easily controlled by mass propaganda than those who think critically for themselves.”

 

“Johnson lowered poverty rates in the black community, yes, but not by supporting black-owned businesses or addressing racist hiring practices and the racial income gap. Instead, he passed a series of bills that essentially distributed checks to struggling black families, thereby giving them the fish instead of showing them how to fish on their own.”

 

“What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.”

 

“We cannot rely on a hopelessly inefficient and burdensome government to fix what we ourselves refuse to do.”

 

“Johnson’s legislation essentially crystallized a long-term pact between blacks and the Democrat Party that still exists today, lending credence to his alleged statement that he would “have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” There is some uncertainty about whether Johnson actually made that bold claim, but even if he did not, a quote attributed to the president by numerous historians and publications lays bare the actual intention behind his historic civil rights legislation: These Negroes, they’re getting pretty uppity these days and that’s a problem for us since they’ve got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we’ve got to do something about this, we’ve got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don’t move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there’ll be no way of stopping them, we’ll lose the filibuster and there’ll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It’ll be Reconstruction all over again.”

 

“And so, because instead of learning about free markets, capitalism, and entrepreneurship, today’s curriculum overemphasizes the role that others play in our success. Students are being systematically disempowered, trained to resent the success of others. And that creates a self-fulling prophecy of sorts. We can never attain what we resent, just as we will never achieve what we loathe. If money and success become the objects of our loathing and resentment, then we can be certain they will never be within our grasp. Our subconscious mind will reject its opportunity seeking to prevent us from becoming that which we have been conditioned to hate.”

 

My Take

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474. The Yellow House

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Julie Horowitz

Author:   Sarah M. Broom

Genre:   Nonfiction, Memoir, Biography, Cultural

376 pages, published August 13, 2019

Reading Format:  Book

Summary

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

Quotes 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

My Take

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

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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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462. In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:   Adam Carolla

Genre:   Non Fiction, Humor, Memoir, Cultural, Politics, Essays

256 pages, published November 2, 2010

Reading Format:  e- Book on Overdrive

Summary

In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks is basically a humorous rant by Adam Carolla against many things PC.  He rips into an absurd culture that demonizes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, turned the nation’s bathrooms into a free-for-all, and puts its citizens at the mercy of a bunch of minimum wagers with axes to grind.

Quotes 

“My feeling is this whole country is founded on the principle of ‘if you are not hurting anyone, and you’re not fucking with someone else’s shit, and you are paying your taxes, you should be able to just do what you want to do.’ It’s the freedom and the independence.”

 

“Fixing your fucked-up life is not government’s job. Handling the stuff that people can’t do themselves—like war—is.”

 

“The government is a giant corporation with no competition that is constantly trying to keep you off balance so it can siphon more money from you.”

 

“I don’t know why I seem to be the only one who understands that when the government provides something for free—whether it’s food, housing, or health care—there is a human cost. The government may be handing you a free block of cheese but they are taking away your motivation to get a job and buy your own f***ing cheese. And what more powerful motivator is there to get up, get work, and get insurance than the fact that not having it could literally kill you?”

 

“But our leaders can’t tell the truth. We won’t let them. We’ve created a society where the politicians aren’t allowed to criticize the people. There’s no tough love coming out of the White House or Congress. They’ve gone from leaders and legislators to wedding caterers. If they want to keep the gig, they better give us what we want.”

 

“Humans need challenges to overcome, just like a muscle needs resistance to grow. In a zero-gravity environment, an astronaut’s muscles atrophy because there is no resistance. The government giving you a bunch of handouts and living your life for you is the equivalent of doing push-ups in outer space. Big government is like the void of space—it’s massive, constantly expanding, and if we immerse ourselves in it, we’ll simply wither away.”

 

“I also remember it was Sunday night because that was the time I felt most depressed and vulnerable. Somehow have a moment to contemplate the miserable, low-paying week that lay ahead was more painful than living it.”

 

“Until you get the family unit back together, we have no hope and we’ll never dig ourselves out of this hole. No matter how great the school is, how excellent the teachers are, how many computers, field trips, or other window dressing there is, until you have intact families that give a s***, we’re doomed. If you have chalk, pencils, and a roof that doesn’t leak, you’ve got a school. Back in the day people would do stuff by candlelight on the prairie and are a f***load smarter than kids now despite all the iPads and online homework. Why? Because if they didn’t read their assignment, their parents would take the ruler they were supposed to be using for that assignment and smack them with it. We don’t need to keep throwing money at the problem, we need to throw parents at the problem.”

 

“Everything seems overwhelming when you stand back and look at the totality of it. I build a lot of stuff and it would all seem impossible if I didn’t break it down piece by piece, stage by stage. The best gift you can give yourself is some drive–that thing inside of you that gets you out the door to the gym, job interviews, and dates. The believe-in-yourself adage is grossly overrated.”

 

“I am not agnostic. I am atheist. I don’t think there is no God; I know there’s no God. I know there’s no God the same way I know many other laws in our universe. I know there’s no God and I know most of the world knows that as well. They just won’t admit it because there’s another thing they know. They know they’re going to die and it freaks them out. So most people don’t have the courage to admit there’s no God and they know it. They feel it. They try to suppress it. And if you bring it up they get angry because it freaks them out.”

 

“As I’ve often said, this is the biggest problem we have in our society—unwanted kids. If we solve this problem we solve all the other problems. So we have to start judging. As I said before, we judge smokers more harshly than we judge deadbeat dads in our current society. Seriously, how many antismoking PSAs have you seen this week vs. ones saying raise your kids, or don’t have kids if you can’t afford them? And what’s hurting our society more? People need to see that asshole and call him an asshole so maybe other people thinking about being assholes wouldn’t become assholes. We stopped judging people a long time ago because the idiots on the left told us everyone is the same and that we couldn’t do that. We need to bring back judging.”

 

“This silliness always starts with celebrities and then spreads to the common folk.”

 

“You should never say to a superior, “I did my best,” when you fuck up, because you are then declaring you are a fuckup. Your best is fucking up. If that’s the case I’d hate to see you on a bad day when you were only putting in 50 percent. The answer is not “I did my best,” it’s “I’ll do better.”

 

“Alaska seems like the most rough-and-tumble spot in the world. Everyone there seems to be running from something in the Lower 48, whether it’s the law, the tax man, or their ex. Alaska’s where you go to forget your past, especially when you owe your past a shitload in child support. The state motto should be “Love fishing but hate your kids? Alaska.” Forget the Jackass movies. I’d like to do a hidden-camera show where we get a guy with a salt-and-pepper mustache, put him in an ATF windbreaker, have him walk into any Alaska bar or honky-tonk after quitting time, and say, “I have a warrant for . . .” and just watch everyone jump out the window. It’s never “I was born and raised in Alaska, lived here my whole life.” It’s usually something like, “My business partner faked his own death and then tried to kill me, but that was before my wife had her gender reassignment . . .” Basically Alaska is the cold-weather Florida. It’s Florida without the Jews. The state capital should be spelled “Jew? NO!”

 

“Being a depressed hippie is a lose-lose. It would be like if a rice cake had the caloric content of a MoonPie.”

 

“My son I worry about. I’m pretty sure he’s gonna be gay. At this point I’m just hoping he’s not a bottom. Sorry to sound closed-minded and uptight, but let’s face it, no dad wants his son to be gay. Not only do you get no grandkids, but I’m sure high school is no picnic for a fifteen-year-old gay boy. On the other hand, maybe I’m just viewing this through the bifocals of an old heterosexual dude. The way things are going, my son will probably get his ass kicked for not being gay. ‘Carolla thinks he’s too good to suck cock. Come on boys, lets get him.”

 

“You measure a good song the same way you measure architecture, fashion, or any other artistic endeavor. Time. You know when you see a picture of yourself from the eighties with a horrible hairdo and some stone-washed jeans and you think, “How embarrassing—what the fuck was I thinking? Why didn’t somebody stop me?” It’s the same thing Mick Jagger and David Bowie should be thinking every time they hear their cover of “Dancing in the Streets.” The point is, at the time it seemed like a good idea, just like kitchens with burnt-orange Formica and avocado appliances, den walls covered with fake brick paneling, and segregation—all horrible decisions that we now universally recognize as wrong. But somehow when it comes to music, we can’t just admit we made a mistake with “Emotional Rescue.” There’s always some dick who defends the past. “Hey, man, I lost my virginity to ‘Careless Whisper.’ ” I’m sure there was somebody who got laid for the first time on 9/11 but they don’t get a boner when they see the footage of the planes going into the tower.”

 

My Take

While not quite as good as the classic Not Taco Bell Material, I mostly enjoyed reading In Fifty Years We’ll All Be Chicks, Adam Carolla’s anti-PC rant.  A bit repetitive at times, but there are some true nuggets of comedy gold.

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