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.
Monday, August 27, 2018
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
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.
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.
Friday, August 17, 2018
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."
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."
Monday, August 13, 2018
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 6, 2018
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.
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.
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