Blockchain Revolution - Don Tapscott

 Sub-title: : How the technology behind bitcoin is changing money, business, and the world

This was a challenging, frustrating and quixotic book about a new technology that is said to revolutionize the world.  If I took nothing else from it, I learned the vocabulary of this emerging game changer.  The authors tout the many marvels that can be achieved with this secure, distributed transaction driver, as I understood it.  They provide multiple chapters on its potential application in financial services, business organization, education, healthcare and government, glossing over the details while stimulating creative thought. They claim it is the Internet of the 21st century and beyond.  I'll be exploring other interpretations to grasp a better understanding of its functions.  

Published: 2016   Read: March 2021  Genre: Technology, Science

The Little Paris Bookshop - Nina George

 This was a delightful book, the kind where you savor every paragraph just for the beauty of the words.  It is the story of Perdu, a 50ish bookseller operating from a barge in the Seine River in Paris.  He offers books to patrons based on his perception of their emotional needs all the while ignoring his own pain at the loss of his great love, Manon.  She'd disappeared while he was sleeping, leaving a letter he has not opened in twenty years.  When he finally succumbs, it sets him on a journey into the life he's been missing.  I enjoyed reading it slowly so much that I didn't mark many passages.  It might require a second reading.

Quotes:

"What task do the departed want us to do? To carry them within us - that is our task.  We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves.  Only they make us whole.  If we begin to forget or cast aside those we've lost, then... then we are no longer present either."

 "Do we only decide in retrospect that we've been happy?  Don't we notice when we're happy, or do we realize only much later that we were?"

"Farewell to a long-expired life, in which one was nothing but a husk, rustled by the occasional sigh." 

Published: 2015   Read: March 2021  Genre: Fiction

Caste - Isabel Wilkerson

 Sub-title: The Origins of our Discontents

Eye-opening and challenging, this book makes me think differently and see the place I've lived differently.

Through keen observation and historical context, Wilkerson explains how the US was predicated on dividing people into separate and unequal groups, black and white.  It's a powerful story of the evolution of racism in America.  Tough to read.  This book provided me with a new perspective on race in America.  I hope to participate in a book group discussion.

Quotes:

Chap. 4 - "It's a measure of how long enslavement lasted in the United States that the year 2022 marks the first year that the United States will have been an independent nation for a long as slavery lasted on its soil.  No current-day adult will be alive in the year in which African-Americans as a group will have been free for as long as they had been enslaved.  That will not come until the year 2111."

Page 111 - The Supreme Court did not overturn these prohibitions [against intermarriage] until 1967...Alabama..did not throw out its law against intermarriage until the year 2000. Even then, 40 percent of the electorate in that referendum voted in favor of keeping the marriage ban on the books."

p. 183 - "Those in the dominant caste who found themselves lagging behind those seen as inherently inferior potentially faced an epic existential crisis.  To stand on the same rung as those perceived to be of a lower caste is seen as lowering one's status.:...  "The elevation of others amount to a demotion of oneself, thus equality feels like a demotion." [my emphasis]

p 387 - "Human beings across time and continents are more alike than they are different.  The central question about human behavior is not why do those people do this or act in that way, now or in ages past, but what is it that human beings do when faced with a given circumstance?" 

Published: 2020  Read: March 2021  Genre: History