Book Reviews

People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re like the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives…Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

                          from Exhalation

No one wanted to do much in the weeks after Nico’s memorial. Whoever you called was busy taking food to Terrence’s place, or you yourself were taking food to Terrence. Or people were sick, just regular sick, with coughs brought on by the drop in temperature. Guys with families flew home for Thanksgiving to play straight for nieces and nephews, to assure their grandparents they were dating, no one special, a few nice girls. To assure their fathers, who had cornered them in various garages and hallways, that no, they weren’t going to catch this new disease.

                          from The Great Believers

Go light on the exclamation points. When overused, they’re bossy, hectoring, and, ultimately, wearying. Some writers recommend that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points per book; others insist that you should use no more than a dozen exclamation points in a lifetime.

                          from Dreyer's English

Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign…We were not Urban Indians then. This was part of the Indian Relocation Act, which was part of the Indian Termination Policy, which was and is exactly what it sounds like. Make them look and act like us. Become us. And so disappear.

                          from There, There

The day before (Sangoma) told the Leopard to take me out and teach me archery. All I learned was that I should try something else. Now I throw the hatchet…
“During my my ithwasa, my master told me that I would see far. Too far,” the Sangoma said.
“Close your eyes, then.”
“You need to respect your elders.”
“I will, when I meet elders I can respect.”

                  from Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Washington may be one of the most seasoned military veterans in the colonies, but that isn’t saying much. Colonial officers like Washington were given inferior positions compared to their British counterparts. As a colonel, Washington was a midlevel officer who had never led more than a hundred men in actual battle…(His) enduring reputation as a great military leader is not based on his technical skill as a tactician. He would win a few impressive battles, but overall he lost more than he won. What made him great—at least in the particular circumstances of the Revolutionary War—was his sheer staying power, his total devotion to his army, his relentless sense of duty, and a stubborn refusal to ever give up.

                  from The First Conspiracy

It seemed the closer he was to what he wanted the more lost he became. The sinking feeling that had plagued him his entire life wasn’t going away. It was getting worse…Mr. Reese had told him that life, at its core, was a cruel burden because we had the knowledge that we were born to die. We were born with innocent eyes and those eyes had to see pain and death and deceit and violence and heartache. If we were lucky we lived long enough to see most everything we love die. But, he said, being honorable and truthful took a little of the sting out of it. It made life bearable.

                     from Don't Skip Out on Me

Educating girls has proven to be one of the world’s best-ever ideas. When women are educated, all kinds of wonderful things happen in societies. The workforce becomes diversified and able to make better decisions and solve more problems. Educated mothers decide to have fewer children and more children survive. More energy and time is invested in each child’s education. It’s a virtuous cycle of change.

                               from Factfulness

Juries were reluctant to convict people for liquor offenses, especially when the evidence disappeared. And the evidence did disappear. There were several cases of liquor evidence disappearing out of Central Precinct or Multnomah County Courthouse. There were at least two cases in Portland where juries drank the evidence during deliberations and then acquitted the accused bootleggers for lack of evidence.

 from Murder & Scandal in Prohibition Portland

“War has always seemed to me a foolish choice for men. Whatever they win from it, they will have only a handful of years to enjoy before they die. More likely they will perish trying.”

“Well, there is the matter of glory. But I wish you could’ve spoken to our general. You might have saved us all a lot of trouble.”

“What was the fight over?”

“Let me see if I can remember the list.” (Odysseus) ticked his fingers. “Vengeance. Lust. Hubris. Greed. Power. What have I forgotten? Ah, yes, vanity and pique.”

“Sounds like a usual day among the gods.”

                                from Circe