What have you read recently? 2009 -2020

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I finally finished the Steve Jobs book. I found it very interesting, both the technical history and his personal story.
 
The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen, by Thomas Caplan is an OK, "stop the bad guys from getting a nuke" thriller. I picked it up at the library based on the glowing introduction from Bill Clinton. Its not bad but Clinton must be a family friend or something to give it this strong a push.
 
Stumbled on a 2002 book called Black Mass, by Dick Lehr and Gerard O'Neill that chronicles Whitey Bulger's criminal history and conspiracy with FBI agents. It is a bit dense but a fascinating look at Government gone amok.
 
I stumbled across a small book-- almost a pamphlet-- that's way outside my comfort zone. Very good read.

The non-profit that oversees fundraising for the USS ARIZONA Memorial is pretty profitable. For that reason, and some other strange reason lost in the sands of state & national politics, it also handles the fundraising for Kalaupapa National Historical Park. So I asked spouse for something to read about that community.

The book is "Olivia: My Life of Exile in Kalaupapa". It's the journal of Olivia Robello Breitha, who was born in 1916. She wrote the book in 1988 yet it's in a number of libraries and it's still sold on Amazon. She put out a video in the 1990s, but I think she's passed on.

Olivia was diagnosed with Hansen's disease at the age of 18. For the next three years she was essentially quarantined to an Oahu hospital under the era's public health laws. There was not an effective treatment for Hansen's disease at that time, but there was the same fear & prejudice that we've seen when 1980s HIV/AIDS was first spreading. Same as 1940s/1950s polio epidemics. Probably the same as the Great Influenza and yellow fever epidemics. Only in this case, Hansen's is for life. Fear of contagion was rampant.

When she left her hospital quarantine one too many times (to visit family or to watch a movie), she was sent to Kalaupapa. It's thought that Hawaiians were exiled there before Western contact, and this practice continued with all Hawaii residents in the 18th-20th centuries. Even with the "rule of law" and "civil rights", someone diagnosed with Hansen's disease during the Roosevelt administration could still be taken into custody by "bounty hunters" and forcibly sent to the hospital... if the community didn't ostracize and exile them first. Of course the direct descendant of that era's attitude was the WWII internment camp.

Even in the 1930s Kalapupapa was an unpleasant and authoritarian place. Nobody protested against the excesses of the public-health laws or advocated for patient's rights. An effective treatment wasn't developed until WWII's sulfa drugs, and even that didn't resolve all the symptoms.

Yes, there are still a few Kalaupapa residents living there, even though their Hansen's symptoms have been in remission for decades. Other former residents have moved back out into the community, although there's not as much support for them there as at Kalaupapa. There's actually a bookstore in the park selling memorial merchandise (and this book). The bookstore's employees use a legal pad instead of the Internet-ready cash register. Their bone-degraded twisted hands can't operate a keyboard very easily, and Kalaupapa does not have reliable Internet access. They actually fax over their legal-pad "transaction log" once a week to the Pearl Harbor staff to enter into the inventory system.

Olivia never completed more than a sixth-grade education, but she writes very well and has been thinking about the issues for a long time. It's a chilling book, and it reveals a side of Hawaii that I've never known. If you've been to Hawaii's happy places then it's worth a read. If you've never been here... then I'd probably hold off reading it until after your first visit.
 
Just finished 'Where the Hell is Matt' written by the guy who danced badly around the world and was sponsored by Stride gum to do so. The book includes anecdotal stories associated with each of the places he went in his last You Tube video. It's available as an e-book.
 
I'm currently reading "A Golf Story", the history of Bobby Jones, Augusta National and The Masters Golf Tournament.

Damn, do I love that place and tournament!
 
Just finished:

Marley and Me

and I highly recommend it. It will make you wish you had a dog and be thankful that you don't at the same time. I haven't seen the movie.
 
Death of Kings by Bernard Cornwell. It is the sixth book in The Saxon Tales saga written about England in King Alfred's era and the struggles to unite England under one king. Great historical fiction, no romantic version of midieval England in these stories. A terrific read if you enjoy this genre. I read the book in about two days, and now must wait for the seventh novel to be published. In the meantime, I'm off to read Sharpe's Tiger, also by Cornwell.
 
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Read The Five People you meet in heaven by Mitch Albom. It's an imaginative story of what happened to an old man who died and awakened in the afterlife where he learns that heaven is a place where your earthly life is explained to you by 5 people who were in it. Meeting these 5 people helped him to cross over, answer all the queries he always asked about his life, learning to forgive and face his earthly fears and prepare himself for a lifetime in heaven. I wonder who will be the 5 people for me to meet in heaven.
 
LauAnn said:
Just finished 'Where the Hell is Matt' written by the guy who danced badly around the world and was sponsored by Stride gum to do so. The book includes anecdotal stories associated with each of the places he went in his last You Tube video. It's available as an e-book.
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I loved it! Got it signed by Matt with a personal note to my husband. That video is one of DH's favorite things.
 
Oh god, Marley and Me. No way I could watch the movie. The book was a tear jerker. However, I happened to read, at the same time, a book that makes Marley and Me look like last week's lunch. It is called Merle's Door, by Ted Kerasote, and anyone who loves their dog should read it. I think his approach to interacting with his dog was just fantastic, while I couldn't help but think that Marley was a "practice kid" for the family and just fodder for his writing campaign. Merle was everything to Ted, and it showed. I consider Merle's Door as one of the most influential books I've EVER read.
 
Paula Span's "When the Time Comes", another eldercare/end-of-life book. This one has a much more positive outlook than Jane Gross' "Bittersweet Season". I'm hoping I can end this reading jag on the upbeat and leave it alone for a while.

Paula's another contributor to the NYT "New Old Age" blog, and she profiles a dozen elders & families as she talks about the various stages of care-- "aging in place", moving in with family, assisted living, full-care nursing homes, and hospice. Good info with much less drama & confusion. She claims that fewer than 5% of elders live in full-care facilities, and nursing home use has been declining for over two decades. Only about 20% of elders use paid home-care assistance, even among the most disabled.

She also demolishes another nuclear-family myth. When the federal govt started paying Social Security in the 1930s, seniors stopped moving in with their kids. Turns out Grandma & Grandpa didn't really want to spend their golden years with the family so much as they wanted to live their own lives. However in those last few years, family is still where the care most frequently happens.

I learned a lot about hospice in this book, too. Almost every family said that they wished they'd started the conversation months earlier. Unfortunately hospice is seen as an admission of defeat and so that option is considered only when it's literally almost too late.

My Dad's made his wishes fairly clear, and my brother's already thinking along the same lines as me. But this book is a big help in practicing the conversation.

Book review: “When The Time Comes” | Military Retirement & Financial Independence
 
Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. It has kept my weekend very unproductive! A good yarn, even if somewhat improbable, about a medical family, set mostly in Ethiopia, where the author grew up. He is currently a professor of clinical medicine at Stanford. The physicians on the forum may enjoy this one.
 
Dr. Verghese taught at Texas Tech for a time. His first book was nonfiction and was about the very first cases of AIDs in the small town where he practiced. It was really good. It's called "My Own Country".
 
Meadbh said:
Abraham Verghese's Cutting for Stone. It has kept my weekend very unproductive! A good yarn, even if somewhat improbable, about a medical family, set mostly in Ethiopia, where the author grew up. He is currently a professor of clinical medicine at Stanford. The physicians on the forum may enjoy this one.
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I read Cutting for Stone last year, and loved it until the end. I went to hear the author speak at the Commonwealth Club shortly after reading the book - he is a very good writer who brings real medical knowledge into his fiction, and is himself a fascinating story. He took time away from medicine to be a part of the Iowa Writers Workshop, then went back to medicine, and has somehow managed to excel at simultaneous careers. If you can willingly suspend disbelief at the beginning, it is an enjoyable book.
 
I just finished To Sleep with the Angels, a book about the 1958 fire at Our Lady of the Angels school in Chicago. Although I was only 2 when the fire occurred I grew up in a near-by suburb and often heard adults speak in hushed voices about the tremendous tragedy. It was a riveting book--well written and researched--and it encompassed not only the lives of those changed by the fire but the very different time in terms of fire safety and building codes, Catholic parochial culture, the immigrant neighborhood (largely Italian), etc. I couldn't put it down. On another note, I'm also reading Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop in advance of the forthcoming Masterpiece Theatre production. Little Nell is tedious--a wimpering waif--but the secondary characters, especially the evil ones, are vintage Dickens.
 
Marita40 said:
I just finished To Sleep with the Angels, a book about the 1958 fire at Our Lady of the Angels school in Chicago. Although I was only 2 when the fire occurred I grew up in a near-by suburb and often heard adults speak in hushed voices about the tremendous tragedy. It was a riveting book--well written and researched--and it encompassed not only the lives of those changed by the fire but the very different time in terms of fire safety and building codes, Catholic parochial culture, the immigrant neighborhood (largely Italian), etc. I couldn't put it down.
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I will have to read that one. I was ten at the time and I remember all the angst.
 
Just finished "Defending Jacob " by Wiliam Landay . Lots of twists and turns . A can not put it down book .
 
I just read an older book which has recently been re released " I 'm dancing as fast as I can ". Really interesting look into drug withdrawal and psychosis .
 
Jerusalem: The Biography

Just halfway through this big book, and had to recommend it here.
The best written history book I've read in several years, and I'm learning so much from it. Things that were hazy in school are made crystal clear here.

Montefiore tells the story of this "universal city, the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths" from its beginnings many thousands of years ago up to the present day. The story is told in terms of the significant players in the city's life, and is just amazingly well done.


Amazon.com: Jerusalem: The Biography: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Amazon.com: Jerusalem: The Biography eBook: Simon Sebag Montefiore: Kindle Store
 
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