Kim L
This dense book is full of gems, like:
Part of what looks like nurture may be the child's nature, expressed in parental reactions.
To speak intimately and clearly - not trying to please or bully the other, not trying to exaggerate one's degree of certainty or uncertainty - is to experience separateness, a frightening but crucial step on the road to mental health.
One can value superficial happiness as a strength, that capacity to get along in life and enjoy certain of its details even over an underlying feeling of emptiness or dread.
As Penelope Fitzgerald wrote, “Unfortunate are the adventures which are never narrated”. I'm glad her adventures were narrated in this biography.
I can't pretend I kept everything straight as I was reading this, but I still enjoyed it.
The thoughts of the author, near the end of the book:
“And so we have to think about what level of mercilessness we feel comfortable with. I, personally, no longer take part in the ecstatic public condemnation of people unless they've committed a transgression that has an actual victim, and even then not as much as I probably should. I miss the fun a little.”
Ronson concludes that it's the norm to be merciless, assumes that we can accurately judge who needs to be publicly shamed, and that it's okay if lives are ruined because someone “commits a transgression that has an actual victim”. “Ecstatic public condemnation”??? Aren't we trying to move past that as a society?
Read this poorly organized, rambly, presumptuous book if you are interested in the often prurient details of shaming victims. Recommend it to people you don't like who seem to have too much time on their hands.
I loved every page of this wonderful, poignant, heartwarming, amusing book. It should be required reading for all 49-year-olds.
I could not help but wonder if we (including me) would have taken this book so seriously had the love affair involved a woman. It's not the responsibility of this book to take that on, but that thought was never far from my mind while reading.
Awesome book!
Tip #1: If you're not familiar with the details of the story, do NOT look at the second set of pictures before you've read the text.
Tip #2: Save this book for reading on a hot, muggy subway... reading about the ice and cold will literally cool you down.
The codfish lays a thousand eggs
The homely hen lays one.
The codfish never cackles
To tell you what she's done.
And so we scorn the codfish
While the humble hen we prize
Which only goes to show you
That it pays to advertise.
This book would get five stars for its thought-provoking nature alone, but I also found the story engaging.
“... we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.”
Got hung up on needing to know the size of the pond the water hyacinth covers in a month. The size of the pond surely must matter. I still liked the book well enough.
Adam Grant is great but (I now realize) best consumed in IG-sized bites and interviews.
Fascinating! Did you know: In 1977, the country of Iran ran out of eggs. Eggs were flown in from Europe, but too many of them. The government looked in to setting up an egg powdering factory, but since one could not be set up quickly enough, the extra eggs were flown back to Europe, powdered there, and flown back to Iran.
I just wish the book had covered Iran Contra also. Sequel?
I approached this book with reservations because 1) of echoes of A Million Little Pieces, 2) I've come to expect authors to be distractingly self-indulgent in this type of writing. But I was engrossed. And it left me with a strong desire to become a hiker.