The Restless Wave by John McCain

If someone else wrote this book, it would have been a fitting eulogy but the Senator did, and modestly.  Yes, of course, I am a biased reader and it was my attempt to have a private wake.

I am at the point now where I think being a senator, but one of the better ones who have served well on several committees and had significant tenure, should be the qualification for President.  The depth of Mc Cain's knowledge of foreign affairs and temperament would have resulted in an exceptional national leader.

The best way to review it, is to quote at length in his own words:

"In President Obama's last year in office, at his invitation, he and I spent a half hour or so alone, discussing very frankly what I considered his policy failures, and he believed had been sound and necessary decisions.  Much of that conversation concerned Syria.  No minds were changed in the encounter, but I appreciated his candor as I hoped he appreciated mine, and I respected the sincerity of his convictions.  Yet I still believe his approach to world leadership, however, thoughtful and well intentioned, was negligent, and encouraged our allies to find ways to live without us, and our adversaries to try to fill the vacuums our negligence created.  And those trends continue in reaction to the thoughtless America First ideology of his successor."

" I was a Republican, a Reagan Republican.  Still am.  Not a Tea Party Republican.  Not a Britbart Republican.   Not a talk radio or Fox News Republican.  Not an isolationist, protectionist, immigrant-bashing, scapegoating, get-nothing-useful-done Republican."

"Here's one fact fools ignore.  Our Constitution and closely divided polity don't allow for winner-take-all governance.  You need the opposition's cooperation to get most big things done."

"... the formula for success for any major piece of legislation … Strike hardest when external events give you an advantage.  Make necessary compromises to a bipartisan coalition in favor of it.  Use your friendships to recruit as many influential members to your side as you can.  Friends on both sides of the aisle will warn you about problems you might not be aware of, they'll tell you who you can count on and who's quietly working against you.  Box in the cynics with public cand medicat attention, make sure the more transactional politicians know there's a cost to opposing the bill.  Leave critical responsibilities to your hardest-nosed allies, and hope they'll stand up to threats and reprisals … A lot of momentum for an issue is illusory and  based on excessive faith in the media's sustained attention to it and the potency of its public support … That's how the sausage gets made."

"There have been times in the past and there will be times in the future when America's conduct at home and in the world will fall short of our own high standards.  That doesn't mean that our values are imperfect, only that we are.  In those instances, our true friends will encourage us to change course,  But we should never believe that our fallibility disqualifies us from supporting the rights of others.  That isn't humility.  It's an abdication of moral responsibility."

RIP, Mr. McCain

The Lives of the Constitution by Joseph Tartakovsky

OK this was a better book than that gift shop collection of short bios of "notorious" women.  But like that rehash of mostly notorious, as in known rather than scandalous females, these lives of nine men and one woman, has some insights and depth to it.  However, it consists of a broad spectrum or politically correct rainbow of people with everything from direct composition of the constitution to those whose stretch legal interpretation to a much more liberal agenda.

Of course the author starters with the actual "builders:"  After reading a detailed biography, the first chapter is Alexander Hamilton; chapter two is about James Wilson of Philadelphia acknowledged as an underrated founder.  An introduction to a new person for me.  Tartakovsky moves on to "fighters" again with a known and lesser known:  Daniel Webster and Stephen Field.  The next category of exceptional minds is Alexis de Tocqueville.  Then the author goes, I believe, far afield to "dreamers" of Woodrow Wilson and Ida Wells-Barnett.

At least he ends on a high note with "restorers:"  Antonin Scalia.

So the best I can say about this book is that it drove me directly to buy Scalia Speaks, a collection of his speeches complied by his son Christopher, which I will give as a Christmas present to at least two people, and to ask my husband to by me Scalia's tome, "Reading Law."  Stay tuned for more exciting reviews.

All Around Me - 1968 The Rise and Fall of the New American Revolution

It was like going to see the movie Harvard Beats Yale 14-14, that was my similar motive to read 1968 …. just to make sure there was no reference to me or anyone I knew in it.  When you're a junior in college, too young to appreciate that something absolutely terrible would happen weekly, if not daily, 1968 did not seem that atypical.  I still think the book I read on Paris 1848 showed a time when insurrection encompassed the majority of the populace, not the would-be revolutionaries and radical-chic.

The anger stemmed from the Viet Nam war, in that I heartedly agree.  I remember screaming my first foulest oath at one of my suite-mates whose father was a general.  Most of the young men I knew from the Ivies were, if not draft dodgers, consumed with figuring out how to keep getting A's in their majors to avoid getting an A-I report to duty letter.  I honestly can't remember any of my immediate friends getting inducted.  But other school-mates did become more radical to the point when I was sure I heard a wire tape when I answered a phone call from someone I knew well involved in a college office take-over.

Cottrell and Browne link women's liberation, the birth of gay rights, Indian occupations, Black Power all to the spirit that flamed over the use of Napalm.  Did I feel like a second class human being because of my gender?  Hell no.  That's the primary reason I went to an all-girl college, so I wouldn't have to put up with male bravado in the classroom and sense of entitlement for academic laurels.  Mixers, football games and long weekends were enough of the male sex.  My school also struggled with integrating.  They purposively recruited minority students from NYC.  There were so few of them that they banded together, eating at the same table in the cafeteria and never going solo into a classroom.

Enough of a stroll down my personal memory lane … this book is okay.  It's layout alone conveys a crammed cycle of critical events in its font size and margins.  One looks at the page and wonders how you can read through all the information.  It makes the book overwhelming and tiresome.  The authors can't help themselves but attribute the election of Obama to the seeds of 1968.  If so, they ought to have acknowledged that after a Democratic, the electorate picked Nixon, a rebalancing of public opinion from the panic of extremes.

Doing my own adjustment, I moved on to read a collection of Americans devoted to the federal Constitution … stay tuned.

Another Single Commodity Book

Vince Beiser's book, The World in a Grain, is not about rice or oats … its about sand.  Kind of reminiscent of the book Salt which I loved years ago, learning lots of geography and economics of something so plain but so essential to life.  And so is sand.

Part 1 is most informative and an easy, fast read:  it relates how concrete is manufactured, as well as using sand in paving roads and making glass.  Back a couple of decades ago, the Hudson River Valley was dotted with cement and concrete plants, so many that it was a promotion for my husband to move here from Boston because he would sell more refractories.  Despite all our entertaining of plant managers, the making of cement/concrete was still a mystery to me, although I sensed something slightly afoul with the folks involved and it was not all related to the air pollution.

But reading these chapters on a lazy day on the new enclosed patio, I kept running inside to tell him that I finally understood how concrete was made and that Portland cement was not named after a city, and that one of the businesses was involved in crimes in other countries.  The chapter on roads went back to Ike and his vision of a great interstate network.  My childhood and teens coincide with the construction of the Thruway and later Northway, and especially going north, with the addition of many bedroom communities and a sense of ease and convenience to get to Saratoga and Lake George, which no longer were the destination for two week vacations, but now a Saturday afternoon jaunt.  And still feeling like a fortunate New Yorker, Beiser's chapter on glass evoked trips to Corning.

I also raced through Part 2 on silicon chips and high tech and how sand is used in fracking for oil.  I even started liking the chapters on beach erosion recalling the first hand experiences I had flying over the south shore of Long Island to see the shifting sands myself and then heading up part of the State's response to Hurricane Sandy.  Finally, I'm into Chapter 8 and my speed and enthusiasm start to slow down.  It is interesting to read the Goliath like venture to make the palm island in the Middle East but Beiser starts to introduce the overlay of oil wealth and one percenters and sand does not seem so universally common.  Building an enclave for the hyper-rich is a long way from an all-season sand box in the basement of my best friends house.

Towards the end of the book, the tone changes to one of world wide shortages, dooms day predictions and human greed.  I think the statistics and trends are self-evident and I do not like being lead by the nose into concluding that the end is near.

Dead and Buried - Life Everlasting by Bernd Heinrich

Well, three wasn't a charm … and after I recommend Bernd to one of my former BFF book club members.  Bernd really isn't attempting to reconcile a concept of after life, after all, he is a biologist.  Instead, chapter after chapter describes the scavengers of the animal world.  I don't want to read anymore about dung or other kinds of beetles, maggots etc.

His impetus to write on this subject was a letter from a friend asking Bernd to bury him on his New England property without benefit neither a casket nor clergy.  Bernd demurs but goes on at great length about the curious boy experiments that he continued to do into manhood watching bugs invade carcasses.  Do not read this book shortly before or shortly after meals.

His premise on metamorphosis, particularly the larvae into a butterfly comes too close to reincarnation but falls flat as he does not dare to attribute this skill to higher life form.  "... and unto dust (soil) thou shalt return."

Do 365 Bad Days Make a Bad Book?

A couple of years ago, I read a book by a couple of Brits who put together a compendium of what famous event occurred or which famous person was born for every day of the year.  They profiled one such event/person but also listed other contenders.  They seemed to focus most on European history, but all cultures and places showed up on one day or another.

So I figured the opposite would work:  Bad Days in History by Michael Farquhar … not.  Farquhar had had to struggle to find something awful 365 distinct times and his badness ranges from the March 2, 2001 desecration of Buddhist temples by the Taliban to the mediocre opening of Disneyland in California on July 17, 1955.  The gamut of "bad" is way too broad.  I guess one man's "bad" is another man's "blah."

At least the book made me wrack my brain before I fell to sleep for the past couple of nights to drag out from my memory those worst days in my life.  Perhaps it is my "golden" age that makes the perspective of looking back decide that nothing was that awful.  That includes two cancer diagnoses, car accidents, kitchen stove fires, husband losing his job, son getting divorced.  That's life and not really anything that would make newspaper headlines.

I was going to illustrate the mediocrity of his gimmicks to find something that occurred today, or on  my birthday but the were so banal, I won't bother.  (Again this was the other book I purchased in a gift shop (remember those not really notorious women) and pledge never to do that foolish, bad thing again.

Reading More Bernd Heinrich: The Homing Instinct

Three reasons to read this one:  (1) this is supposed to be my year theme of biographies of scientists; (2) after reading the Snoring Bird, I decided out of the other lives I read, his was the most interesting and the best written; and most importantly, (3) my family's sense of roots.

While I itch to send off for a DNA kit, my identity is very strongly rooted in being a half Irish, half French resident of upstate New York.  Both my parents had the same Irish/French mix with only the gender of my grandparents being switched.  Both families have long solid roots in the State capital and no one ever seemed to want to venture far from home.  Reading Heinrich's book The Homing Instinct might explain sort of why.

I moved to my first "home" when my parents built a house in the suburbs when I was nine months old; I lived there until I was 28, moving to an apartment probably two miles away.  The 50s and 60s were a time when oodles of neighborhood kids roamed freely to venture to the undeveloped end of the street to gather tumbleweeds, bring home tadpoles and pick endangered lady slippers.  The street became a "cult" to those who moved away kept asking what was new on the "street."

As Heinrich shows, I too decided to build my own home on an empty lot in the next suburb over once we had more children than bedrooms in our apartment.  Our youngest has a strong, strong sense of his town and city, and after a semester or two going to college down the river, "homed."  (The other son, probably more influenced and venturesome (like my husband's family) moved to Texas before he turned 18.

Like The Snoring Bird, the reader has to stick with Heinrich to get to the best parts of his stories.  My first aha moment didn't come until page 274 this time when he moves on to fire:

"Keeping fire, and presumably much later also creating it, would have been a precious skill.  No other animal has ever master it  But before we invented the tool to make and then catch a spark and turn it into fire, we had to "understand" fire.  We had to know its behavior, its quirks and characteristics.  Otherwise we would have had no idea what to do with the spark, to make it grow into a tiny flickering flame, and to tenderly nurture it, keep it alive and make it grow  These skills are not rote.  They are built on understanding or "empathy" for the fire, as though it were alive.  Our understanding of fire required something akin to what psychologists and behavioral biologists call "theory of mind," the capacity mentally to place ourselves into th life of another being or thing, which allows us to predict how it might react."

Hence home and hearth.  When we built the house, I insisted on a fireplace.  It stood unused for over thirty years.  The first thing I did once retired, was to put in a gas insert so I can sit by the "fire" all winter long.  And I sit by the fire pit in the yard in the summer, being the fire-keeper, gathering wood, starting it and emptying the ash.

As much as I've traveled, and despite the attraction of moving to where our older son lives, I would rather invest my funds into making my home more homey.

And Heinrich is at his best when he is homey, self-disclosing, talking about his parents, their roots in Europe, his new American home and his allegiance to Maine.  When he describes his studies of insets and birds, even when out of the country, he always brings the stories back to his fields and friends.  On to his book, on life everlasting.

Five or Sx Quick Reviews

Before I bundle these books up to donate to the used books dumpster at the library, I guess I should post some notes/impressions for posterity.

First a preface:  retirement has made me lethargic and angry.  An attitude of I can get to it tomorrow - there's no hurry, has led me to do almost nothing.  I still do bury my head in books and jig saw puzzles, but I am not at all sure whether I wrote up anything for many of the books I have plowed through.  So in no particular order,

Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk by Kathleen Rooney was inspired by the life of Margaret Fishback, the highest paid female advertising copywriter in the world when she worked for Macy's in the 1930s.  Obviously, pre-dates the mad men mystic and recalls a time when the illusion of need was anchored in pen and ink drawings and often rhyming enticements to the buyer, not the specs of the product.  Boxfish/Fishback herself while resting on the apex of her industry, was also an example of the business bias towards women … she had to quit when she got married.

The life portrayed herein spans decades of boom and bust in NYC, from Delmonico's to WTC construction sites.  It is the story of the City through time that kept me reading, although her style of advertisements called me back to my days of commercial art in high school and had me recall similarly styled ads from my uncle's store.  This would be a good book club choice if we hadn't dismembered and I might just tuck it in the mailbox of a former member rather than adding it to the recycled book collection.

So while I am talking about NYC, I also read Bonfires of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, primarily because he died and I felt I needed to do an honorarium as I never read anything by him (I did see The Right Stuff with my son, and have concluded I might have been reading that book rather than BotV.  There were many times when I asked myself should I keep reading.  Like Lillian Boxfish, this placed me back into another point of time in the City, although I only had one friend who lived (modestly) on Park Avenue.  Of course, I had a better friend living in the Bronx, but thankfully not in public housing.  So, I made no notions/references on the first page until page 508 (it was a wonder at that point that I kept on reading).  But this seeming divergence about the Amazon Bororo Indians does tie in beautifully to an underlying them in the novel.  To quote at length:

"The Bororo Indians, a primitive tribe who live … in the Amazon jungles of Brazil, believe that there is no such thing as a private self.  The Bororos regard the mind as an open cavity … in which the entire village dwells … For nearly three millennia, Western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique, something encased inside each person's skull … This inner self had to deal with and learn from the outside world … and it might prove incompetent in doing so.  Nevertheless, at the core of one's self there was presumed to be something irreducible and inviolate.  Not so ...Each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment."

My next notation comes from page 626 (yes the book goes on like War and Peace) as a cure for the gangster pimp roll so evident in outer borough courts:  "... walk with his hands clasped behind his back, the way .. Prince Charles walks on television while inspecting an artifacts museum … So now as Roland came walking into the grand-jury room … in his preppy clothes, he could have passed for a student at Lawrenceville ruminating over the Lake poets.  (C'mon who but a yuppy Conn/Coll English major would get this).  And finally, in this MeToo age, "... suffering the pangs of men whose egos lose their virginity - as happens when they overhear for the first tie a beautiful woman's undiluted, full-strength opinion of their masculine selves."

Why I finally ended up finishing the book is likely due to the fact that once Sherman McCoy is apprehended, the book turns into a murder mystery.

Next, don't buy a book in a gift shop!  Hoping to pick up a new puzzle at a mall gift shop, my eyes wandered to a new section, probably added for the summer to entice vacationers to read anything on a rainy day.  So based on a racy cover of the legs of a wanton 18th/19th century woman with lacy stockings and beribboned garters, I bought Scandalous Women by Elizabeth Kerri Mahon.  I didn't end up diving into unknown moral turpitude.  First of all, several of the chapters seem to equate notoriety with "note-ability:"  Warrior Queens (Joan of Arc?); Crusading Ladies (Carry Nation); Amazing Adventuresses (Amelia Earhart).  So I was introduced to only a damn few vixens that I hadn't heard of before, and certainly was left wanting wanton-ness.

Remember?  This was supposed to be my year of reading biographies about scientists.  So I did read a couple more.  Tesla by W. Bernard Carlson.  When I look back at my face page citations, I'm back to my collecting wonderful 18th and 19th century names.  You'd think I was still mocking up illustrative DMV documents for job manuals:  Zanobe Gramme, Hippolyte Fontaine, Titus de Bobula, Dieudonne Lontin.  Love 'em.

Well, it's no wonder that Elon Musk (another great name by the way) chose Tesla for his car, indicative of vision, theatrics and less follow through.  After his early success with AC, Tesla's inventions remained unimplemented prototypes, often theortical rather than operational models.

Beware a biography where the author feels compelled to write an epilogue to tell the reader what the subject's life means and why he was less successful due to certain personality characteristics and the biases and discrimination of his age.

The Snoring Bird by Bernd Heinrich is a most deceptive title … focus more on the subtitle My Family's Journey though a Century of Biology.  This really the gist and force of the book.  While as long as Tesla (give or take 400 pages) Heinrich is readable and full of contributing factors that led to his father's successes and ultimate "out-datedness."  With so much background on his father's military history in WWI and the family's horrors from WWII, one could harken back to the Bororo's with the environment and times defining one's personality, successes and fears.  I have no face pages references etched into this book.  It is impactful for its length and breadth of tracing biology from the field to the lab over time.  And unlike Carlson's book I would order and plow through another of Heinrich's many books, challenging but rewarding, and also an appreciation of the world around us.

More Than Mauve

Deeper into my theme now of biographies of scientists with Mauve by Simon Garfield, about the discoveries of William Perkins.  At age 18, Perkins, experimenting with coal tar looking to make quinine in the lab, discovered the first of chemical based colors, "inventing mauve."  (This review should be read along with the next one on the discoveries of William Smith, both English men disdained by both the aristocrats and university employed chemists.  Both Perkins and Smith's treatment is reminiscent of Rosalind Franklin's.)

While experimenting with chemist August Hoffman in 1865, he noticed that the "slag" at the bottom of equipment had a strange interesting color, the first aniline dye.  Fifty years later, there were over two thousand artificial colors.  Today, industry uses petroleum as the ready source of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, etc.  This is organic chemistry, the science of carbon-compounds.

As Perkins explained what happened, "I was endeavouring to convert an artificial base into the natural alkaloid quinine, but my experiment instead of yielding the colorless quinine, gave a reddish powder ... when digested with spirits of wine gave the mauve dye."  (Or as the Victorians said, "morve."  Others belittled the chance find, and most of the book then goes on to trace the gulf between pure and applied science, as Perkins himself jumped to the production of dyes rather than stay full time in the laboratory, opening his own factory.

Besides being a life line of Perkins' life's ups and downs, it reprises the factors on the industry and its migration to Germany, the effect of British patent complexities, fashion, accolades and fetes and final near ignorance of this man's contributions to organic chemistry's boon to medicine and every day life products.

Why again am I surprised that the books I choose under a particular theme keep intertwining?  Franklin has similar life experience as Perkins, Perkins in turn parallels William Smith's ventures; but oddly enough, this books makes me want to reread one of the books I know leave within easy reach, The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, which on page 169, gives a short and sweet summary of Perkins' discovery and the rise and fall of this color which became associated with mourning and menopausal women.  So out of fashion, almost to the nth degree, behooves me to strip wallpaper from two rooms upstairs.

Last Post of the Day, a Novel

I think I've mentioned before that my daughter-in-law's mother is a book editor and when my DIL comes north, she usually brings me a collection of books her mom has reviewed prior to print.

I think Sourdough by Robin Sloan falls into this pre-publication category.  When not reading history or science these past eighteen months or so, I would lapse into stories about food.  Most of these books were gimmicky, as is Sourdough which is a combination of San Francisco chef hero-worship and Egger's sci fi futurism from The Circle.

It is a bit reminiscent of the book I read about the guy from the Hudson Valley who compulsively made a loaf of bread every day trying to make the perfect one.  Her the heroine stumbles into obtaining a mysterious sour dough starter that not only sings to her but one that always bakes the exact same face like crust.  So the author tries to add to her book plot/recipe so it appeals to foodies, murder mystery fans and sci fi fiends.

The imagined cutting edge food market along the SF bay literally explodes when the minimalist/chemists steal the organic microbes and the place blows up "like a giant panetone."  Come on.  Just a dash of humor.  And finally spice with RomCom, having the heroine find her true love, an email émigré who used to deliver her take out orders.

This book is like the buffet at 99, don't eat there, don't read this book.

Captivating Book Title: The Thieves of Threadneedle Street

Same trip to Saratoga, same bookstore, same history section.  Lure of a book title with the quaintest street name, Threadneedle, a name that brings back wonderful childhood learning to sew memories, and a subtitle that evokes my reading of JP Morgan's life:  The Incredible True Story of the American Forgers Who Nearly Broke the Bank of England.  (Not my favorite foreign country, by the way.)

I have to say quite bluntly that if my staff had written this book, I would have yelled at them as that sat around my round table, heads down.  It is quite impossible to follow the chronology of the crime, who did what when and how were they caught.  I sometimes think the author, Nicholas Booth, by writing so non sequitur purposefully intended to make the crime more nefarious.  While the perpetrators had multiple levels of scheming going on and devised many side bar trips and aliases, the reader is befuddled to know if what is being presented is occurring, being given as testimony during the trial or part of Pinkerton's investigation.   Nor does it help that the criminals were related, having the same last name, associates having the same first names, and everyone pretending to be each other to cover their tracks.  A time line or interlock would help someone get through this crime story.

Like reading J P Morgan, the dollar amounts seem small compared to my last work portfolio's values, but unlike Morgan, the description of notes and floats seems so much more primitive than Wall Street banking.  It was a time when image was everything, a sort of Brett/Bart Maverick quality of dressing well shysters and schemers.

The story contains the germs of international monetary fraud on a large scale and traces the early days of private detectives.  Nonetheless it is a difficult read and a reader only gets footing and balance after hundreds of pages of false directions.

Where and When: Heaven's Ditch

It was President's Day and the spa was completely booked up. so my friend and I headed to the other Spa, Saratoga.  There is a wonderful new local bookstore on Broadway, across from the restored Adelphi where we had oysters and charcuterie at the bar for lunch, were I lost Pat as I headed to the history section.  There I purchased a couple of books, the better of the two reprised herein.

Heaven's Ditch - Gold Gold and Murder on the Erie Canal by Jack Kelly (not the Maverick one) appealed to me as (1) local history and (2) a construction project.  (Sideline it is Brett and not Bart that otherwise appeals to me.)

What I didn't count on getting was an extensive history of central NY religious fanaticism.  The gold in the book is not the profitability of canal commerce, but the golden tablets Joseph Smith "dug" and therefrom established Mormonism.  He was not the only such founder in the area that saw an epidemic of new faiths:  Seventh Day Adventists and Anti Masonic political fever, the gullibility preyed upon by both Barnum and Weed himself as a rag newspaper man.

I loved the engineering challenges and creativity recorded in the book.  Loved finding the roots of Thurlow Weed who dominated both my recently read books on Jackson, Lincoln and Grant.  Instead of doing what I have been doing lately on the title page of my books -- citing page numbers of meaningful quotes and sections I underlined -- someone opening the Canal will find a list of names, names that if I were a school marm back in those days, I would have thoroughly enjoyed, and struggled not to titter, when reading a roster of "Obidiah Dogberry, Orestes Brownson, Enos Thropp, Lowton Lawson, Hamlet Scranton, Ebenezer Hatch, Parly Pratt, Orange Dibble."  Wouldn't you just love to ancestry.com these folks for extended family trees?  Makes me wish I heard of them when I was using college classmate names on sample driver licenses I inserted into procedural manuals when I worked at DMV.

Tent preaching and a fad of digging for buried treasures portray not only the community entertainment of the age and area but the gullibility of the mass population ... a population that by class was suspicious of the more educated and prosperous who tended to fulfill their own affiliation needs by becoming Masons.

This is a marvelous history book for New Yorkers,  Most of whom solely associate a mule named Sal with the Canal, not the native ingenuity generated as the terrain changed from the Montezuma Swamp to the Finger Lakes dolomite.  It documents the political ties with the NYS Assembly and the Canal Commission and the need for day laborers, mostly Irishmen from the five corners in NYC, bringing an entire new transient working class into the population of farmers, traders and ministry.

The book made me want to travel through the canal now just to slowly soak in the varying terrain of the State instead of speeding along the Thruway.  It also made me think again about State infrastructure investments that end up being unprofitable, decaying remnants of industries which speed by them with never ending technological advancements.

Why doesn't the NYS Education Department require history fairs like science fairs?  Let each child in school read a book like this one and report out to the class what hooked him/her about learning more about the State.

IgNobel Men

I never heard of Rosalind Franklin.  We've all heard of Francis Crick and James Watson and their Nobel prize for discovering the structure of the DNA molecule.  It was Franklin's x-ray photograph of the molecule that showed them what it looked like.  Her boss, whom she wasn't even speaking to at the time she shot the molecule, shared in the prize with them.

Rosalind is not the Dark Lady of DNA, except that she worked in a photography lab.  She personifies her age:  science being predominantly an all boys club where connections and influence tampered with pure discovery in award making.  Rosalind like all of us inherited characteristics for her family's genes and her family's history in a point of time.  She focused on accuracy and precision, at a cost of forgoing leaps of imagination.  All of her work rested on fact and direct observation, she was not a speculator.  Her talents and assets were recategorized as flaws and limitations by more tied in ambitious male scientists.

She bounced around the world trying to get a position in a laboratory that was tenured and accommodating.  It proved almost impossible.

The book could make a livid feminist extol her as an abused victim of male dominance.  That band wagon seems to play a song most younger women no longer listen to.  It becomes more a morality tale, of a woman tempered by her culture and time.  But aren't we all?  It is a tale of caution and insight, suggesting skills women might need to still navigate the world of work successfully.

To Crick and Watson, there was no i teamwork, but a big capital one in PrIze.

From Leadership to Science but Still Dwelling in Nonfiction

Well, I guess I wasn't really fully back when I announced my return to posting three months ago was I?  I must admit retirement is a lot like taking a cure.  There are plenty of things I keep doing from my pre R-day life, like fancy cooking, reading and my new hobby -- home improvement construction supervision -- but my urge to communicate has dropped below freezing.  Because I restrain myself from calling or writing my former staff, as my voice is now only a weak impression or reminiscence without authority, my brain has concluded that others are equally unaffected by my literary reviews.

Too bad, I will really try over the next couple of days to at least array all the books I have read this fall and winter even if my clever turn of phrase is somewhat rusty.

Since I last posted I did figure out a theme for 2018 -- moving from my quest to understand what makes a good national leader, to reading in the sciences.  Let me start with a book I read yesterday in just a couple of hours.  (Remember readers, you can always tell an easy book if it has book club discussion questions in the back.)  Nonetheless, I found some interesting concepts and contrast and compare opportunities in Irene Pepperberg's Alex and Me.

Pepperberg is a chemist who ended up doing experiments in biology, specifically to determine whether and how language develops in non-mammals; as opposed to those scientists who were working at teaching sign language to chimps and gorilla, she worked with grey parrots that vocalized.
Isn't it the knee jerk reaction that parrots echo back words and phrases in mindless repetition of noises they heard from humans?  Was the bird really hungry when Polly asked for a cracker?  Dr. P found out her parrot Alex was no birdbrain, as he not only learned how to say colors, numbers, shapes, not to mention food, but also could answer questions to distinguish between them.  He understood categorization, comparison.

He listened to what the lab workers said to him and each other in jest and knew under what emotional conditions to say a particular phrase, from wanna go back (into his cage) for both when he was bored doing his experiments to when he was frightened by seeing raptor owls out a window.  He could sense human feelings, when to say I'm sorry, and he displayed a sense of humor.  When he was bored with a repetitive experiment that he had mastered, he would intentionally give every wrong answer associated with a test (like if there were two items on a table, he would say, 5, 3, 1, 4, everything but 2).

His higher reasoning was evidenced by his ability to associate color, size and number among various items and could answer which category had more of some characteristic in it.  Dr. P wanted to see if he understood that words were made up of distinct sounds that could be recombined.  Like a baby babbling in a crib, she had heard Alex vocally play with "green" saying cheen, been, keen.  Strongly evidencing this insight, one day when he wanted food during a test and kept saying "want a nut" he grew so frustrated he said, "want a nut .... nnn, uh, tuh" and spelled it out for her.  When she got a second parrot, Alex would pipe out answers when Griff was slow to reply and often told him to "say better."

Rather than continuing to marvel at the thoughtful language Alex developed, I will now act more like a book reviewer.  Pepperberg writes like she is teaching Alex.  She seems to be condescending  when she tells us the behavioral terms of language development.  She stays rigidly within her boundaries of seeing how language develops not making any assumptions about what the ability to speak actually empowers a speaker to express.  She sees emotions in her bird, humor, boredom, insistence, authority but does not make the leap between being and saying.

Lastly as I inevitably do, Alex and Me parallels themes and observations expressed more angrily in the book I read just before A&M,  Rosalind Franklin The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox.  (See next post.)