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.