2022 Reading Year in Review

I read 41 books in 2022, 12 less than last year and I smacked myself up the side of the head when I realized why---I've had my nose in my phone, or more specifically, surfing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tik-Tok!  That's substituting mindful, focused, in-depth reading for 30 second fixes IMHO.  A few weeks of tracking revealed I was spending an average of 4.5 hours EACH DAY on casual internet reading!  So, those apps are off my phone, and I've resolved to only check some of them and then only once a day.  I'm already seeing an improvement in my attention span, focus and general well-being.  That being said, this year's reads were an interesting mix.

I read 11 fiction books, and only one of those that I consider worth reading, The Power by Naomi Alderman a futuristic feminist story with a dark theme.  There were several books on history (7), many memoirs (9) and science ones (6), most with a genealogy related theme.  

My other recommended reads were The End of Genetics by David Goldstein, on the future potential of genetic editing; The Smartest Guys in the Room by Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind on the greed of the Enron conspirators, still relevant today; Uprooted by Peter Boni on discovering he was conceived by artificial insemination in the 1940s.  I enjoyed what I learned from Moonshot by Albert Bourla about Pfizer developing a Covid vaccine, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes an older title from 1986 on the intersection of science, the military and politics as well as How the World Really Works by Vaclav Smil addressing our dependence on ammonia, plastics, steel and concrete.

I'm reviewing my TBR list as I enter 2023 and hoping to finish some on that list.  Let me know if you've read any of my 2022 selections or what your favorite reads were in 2022.

Before Your Memory Fades - Toshikazu Kawaguchi

 This was a lovely, touching read, cleverly asking what we would do if we could go back in the past, yet not be able to change anything in the present?  In short vignettes, Kawaguchi introduces us to four individuals attempting to reconcile a hurt in their lives and the lives of their loved ones.  Each chapter is a surprise, a gentle unveiling of getting beyond that pain and moving on into the future.  This is the third book in the series.  

The setting is a coffee shop where one can go back to the past "before the coffee gets cold" in the cup poured for the time traveler.  Throughout the story, the characters are deciding how they would respond to the dichotomies posed in the book "What if the world was ending tomorrow? One Hundred Questions".  Each question asks the reader to make a decision about a situation with the end of the world in mind, forcing an answer we would likely avoid in real life. 

My mind has a problem keeping track of characters with unfamiliar names, in this case Japanese ones, but I caught on eventually.  I don't know if I'll read the other books but I enjoyed discovering this one.

Quotes:

"Burnout syndrome is considered by some to be a type of depression.  But while depression begins with the stress of fatigue or a large shock like an accident or a loss, burnout syndrome originates with the thought that all of one's efforts are in vain.  It strikes right at a time when life is not turning out as expected, despite devotedly pouring one's soul into a certain activity, usually one's work."

"Inside every person is an inherent capability to make it through any kind of difficulty.  Everyone has that energy.  But sometimes when that energy flows via our anxiety valve, the flow can be restricted.  The greater that anxiety, the greater the strength needed to open the valve and release the energy.  That strength is empowered by hope.  You could say that hope is the power to believe in the future."

"Something I strongly believe is that we mustn't allow the death of a person to be the cause of unhappiness.  The reason for that is simple: if we let everyone who dies be a cause for unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy.  But the opposite in fact is true.  People are always born for the sake of happiness."

Published: 2022   Read: December 2022  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

A Dirty Job - Christopher Moore

I've read other books by this author and enjoy his sharp witted dialogue and quirky characters.  In this novel, the hero, a Beta-Male named Charles Asher, is given the job of Death Merchant, responsible for collecting the souls of the recently departed.  The absurd and zany adventures was a great escape for a few nights of reading.  There's a sub-text of how we deal with the loss of loved ones and our fear of death.  

Quotes:

"[Talking about his Mom dying with his sister] You're doing the same thing, trying to reconcile all the moms that Mom ever was - the one you wanted, the one she was when you needed her and she was there, the one she was when she didn't understand.  Most of us don't live our lives with one, integrated self that meets the world, we're a whole bunch of selves.  When someone dies, they all integrate into the soul - the essence of who we are, beyond the different face we wear throughout our lives."

"I've seen it again and again, said Charlie, more with men than women...a wife or husband dies, and it's like the survivor is roped to him like a mountain climber who's fallen into a crevasse.  If the survivor can't let go--cut them loose, I guess--the dead will drag them right into the grave."

Published: 2006  Read: December 2022  Genre: Fiction 

 

A Short History of Humanity - Johannes Krause and Thomas Trappe

 Sub-title: A New History of Old Europe

Krause is an archaeogeneticist, an archaeologist who focuses on the ancient DNA discovered in archeological digs. His co-author, Thomas Trappe is a German health journalist.  The book re-visits previously recovered remains from ancient origins to apply the latest DNA technical analysis tools.  Using this updated information, some discoveries are reaffirmed, and others updated or revised entirely.  As explained in recent articles where ancient (13th-14th century) remains are analyzed, in some cases, entirely new discoveries are made.  The book can get a bit technical on the science used.  I was fascinated with the process and how our understanding of ancient migration patterns, languages, and diseases can be tracked using DNA.

Quotes:

p 27 "A mutation reliably appears in mtDNA only every 3,000 years on average...this means that for 3,000 years, the mtDNA passed down along a female line is identical."

p 27 "The mtDNA of all living modern human beings can be traced back to a single female ancestor...she lived around 160,000 years ago...mitochondrial Eve. A male counterpart, chromosomal Adam, lived almost 200,000 years before mitochondrial Eve however, so we can say with certainty that they weren't a couple."

p 41 "Some Europeans and many South Asians, inherited a gene that causes a much stronger immune reaction to a COVID-19 virus infection.  Carriers of the Neanderthal gene are three times more likely to die from this newly emerged virus."

p. 144 "Using DNA analysis, we were able to identify men from five consecutive generations in some family graves, but we did not find a single adult female descendant, confirming that the daughters of the families were likely sent away before they became adults.  Evidently sons, instead, inherited the farmsteads from their fathers. ..In all, this genetic data reveals patriarchal and hierarchical structures that became widespread during the Bronze Age and continue to shape some familial and social conventions even today."

p. 167..." in 2012, the US Dept. of Defense launch the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Algorithm Challenge...to develop a computer algorithm that would quickly discover and identify bacterial and viral DNA.  Daniel Huson, a specialist in bioinformatics, developed a related algorithm that could match a billion DNA sequences to their organism of origin within 24 hours..instead of weeks.

Published:  2021  Read: December 2022  Genre: History, Science

Democracy's Data - Dan Bouk

 Sub-title: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them

The author, a computational mathematician and historian, takes us on a journey through the evolution of the U.S. census, using the 1940 census that was released in 2012.  He takes us through how the census questions were chosen, how the forms were distributed and tallied, how the enumerators interviewed the people and how the population responded.  A geeky, nerdy read for a genealogist that adds a perspective on what went in to creating one of our valuable sources.  Did you know the 1850 census missed a huge part of California due to a fire?  Or that in 1920, Tacoma Washington's rolls were overstated by 30,000 imaginary people?

Bouk tells the stories behind the data, beginning with "the Question Men', the government officials (all men, except for one woman) who chose the questions to be included, and which ones to exclude.  He covers the doorstep negotiations on what name was recorded by the enumerator and the force fitting of everyone into a form designed for a traditional nuclear family.  He demonstrates how what and who was left out of the census reflected the values, good and bad, of the 1940s and the decades before then.  It devotes a chapter to how a politician encouraged the population to not answer the census as he framed it as a a breach of privacy and it's use to identify Japanese Americans in WWII was an egregious abuse. 

I enjoyed learning the history of the census, its benefits and shortcomings and most of all its importance to our country.  

Quotes:

"The historian of quantification Caitlin Rosenthal teaches students to read the frame of the data- the column headings and row names whatever organizes and constrains the data."

"In 1850, the census began enumerating each free individual by  name.  ..Ralph Waldo Emerson called this time the age of the first person singular."

"Jennifer Mendelsohn's...#resistancegenealogy"

"The 1920 census was plagued by padding fiascos- most spectacularly in Tacoma, Washington...conspired with local enumerators to make up more than thirty thousand people."

"maps created by...risk evaluators for the Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC) to support federal mortgage lending."

"The Census Bureau lent its experts to the INS to help design the alien-registration forms, to facilitate the nationwide process of getting immigrants to register..."

"In 1850, the official report noted that the new state of California had suffered a data catastrophe, with multiple counties' worth of figures (including San Francisco County) were burned or lost in transit."

"Big data ...innovator says don't worry about where the data came from...this book has made clear how foolish and dangerous a cry like that is.   When data ets represent people, those who want to ue that data should have to think..how those datafied persons can continue to be faithfully and justly represented."

"In 1929 the number of representatives was capped at 435 and the number of people represented was 40,000 ...and has risen to 700,000."

Published: 2022  Read: November 2022  Genre: History

The Smartest Guys in the Room: - Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind

 Sub-title: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron 

I'd taken a while to finish this, reading a bit at night for several weeks.  It's a hard story to take.  The greed, arrogance, bravado of smart people without a conscience or concern what whether what they were doing was right, only that it could be done.  

Published: 2013  Read: November 2022  Genre: Business, History

Credentials for Genealogists - Paul Gorry

 Sub-title: Proof of the Professional

Sometimes, you read something to expand your knowledge of a teeny slice of a subject and add to your understanding of a niche topic.  I ordered this book off of Amazon to see the full picture of what educational opportunities exist for those of us interested in genealogy to have "credentials" to prove our knowledge and experience. This is a fantastic summary of the different programs and organizations.  It provides a history of their development and where they are today.  There's a list of the acronyms representing the various offerings, a good reference for any genealogist.  I recommend it for your genealogy reference shelf.

Published: 2021 (2nd Ed) Read: October 2022  Genre: Science

American Nations - Colin Woodard

Sub-title: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Do you have ancestors from the 17th and 18th centuries in North America? Are you tracing families as they migrated across the United States?  Woodard takes us through the wave of settlers in North America and illustrates the impact of their differing beliefs and values on our society today.  I recommend this book as a must read for any genealogist!

The book asks "Why do Americans have such a difficult time agreeing on basic issues?"  The answer is that the different regions of the country evolved from eleven different "nations".  For genealogists, his description of their settling and migrating across the United States provides essential insight into the origins of our ancestors.

The 11 regions described are: El Norte, New France, Tidewater, Yankeedom, New Netherland, Deep South, Midlands, Greater Appalachia, Far West, the Left Coast, and First Nation. Each region grew from their founding members into distinct groups with shared goals reflected in their viewpoints.

El Norte originated with the Spanish explorers and settled New Mexico, Texas, Arizona.  New France settled North East Canada and Louisiana. Tidewater originated with English settlers to Virginia. the Pilgrims and Puritans desired to build new societies in Yankeedom. New Netherland originated with the Dutch settlers in New York.  

The Deep South grew from entrepreneurs from the Caribbean exploiting slave labor..the Midlands from those moving away from the East Coast regions...Greater Appalachia from Scotch/Irish wanting to be left alone.  The Far West ...Left Coast and First Nation grew from the migration of the first groups across the continent.  The author goes into detail on each regions' founding and it evolution to date.

Interestingly, in the Epilogue, he addresses what the future of these regions that now form the United States. He predicted in 2011 when the book was published the possibility that 

"faced with a major crisis, the federations leaders will betray their oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution... In the midst of say, a deadly pandemic outbreak...a fearful public might condone the suspension of civil rights. One can easily imagine circumstances in which some nations are happy with the new order and others deeply opposed to it."

A great read with a fascinating perspective on how we all got here. 

Quotes:

"Cultural geographers came to similar conclusions decades ago.  ...formulating a key theory...called the Doctrine of First Effective Settlement" 

p. 317 "the red and blue nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy...just as they have since the First Continental Congress."  

MAP of nations

 

Published: 2011  Read: September 2022  

The Super Age - Bradley Schuman

Sub-title: Decoding Our Demographic Destiny 

I've long been an advocate for understanding the impact of our aging society.  This book documents the coming "age storm" and the potential impacts on all aspects of society.  It was repetitive in making its point which bogged down the reading.  I took awhile to finish it.  I've long been fascinated with the impact of aging and this read added a new perspective.

Quotes:

"p 24 - In 1875, American Express Company started offering private corporate pensions, the first of their kind.  The stated goal was to reward ...workers...as a charitable way to ease them out of the workforce.  Again, that tied in to the ability of a worker to do a job and was not necessarily tied to chronological age."

p.29 - "...most national social welfare systems are predicated on having a relatively large, you working population that pays taxes to support a relatively small, older retired population.  National economies, which are built on the false premise o perennial growth, could begin to contract."

p. 33 "The Greeks saw aging as a downward slope of decrepitude.  They even worshipped Geras, the god of old age, who was represented as a shriveled-up man holding a cane."

p. 88 ..women who serve their families as homemakers and caregivers, rather than in income-generating work, are doubly penalized..they do not attain financial freedom during their lifetimes...financial security in old age is tied to marital status and financial success of their husband.  The system was designed this way.  Husbands, as it turns out, are a terrible retirement policy."

p. 169 [describing Mitsubishi older worker program] "...is important because it illustrates the necessity of retaining and transferring institutional knowledge."

p. 171 [on generationally diverse staff] "Considering the whole life...a generationally diverse Super Age staff will have different needs."

p 196 "...everyone wants to be part of something.  All people want to belong and be seen as part of something."

p. 205 "Establishing a cooperative is one strategy an older entrepreneur can employ to ext from a business and make a profit while keeping important services in the community."

Published: 2022   Read: September 2022  Genre: Non-fiction

Who's Black and Why? - Henry Louis Gates Jr and Andrew S Curran

 Sub-title: A Hidden Chapter from the Eighteenth-Century Invention of Race

This book is a review and a reprint of letters written in the late 1700s for a contest that asked the question in the title.  It illustrates the evolution of the opinions that existed at the time.  The author's review explains how the writers explanations predicated the concepts of race that exists today.  I read the intro and reviews and a few of the translated letters.  There is a good chronology of the representation of Africans and race from ancient times up through 1890s.

Quote:

"By the end of the eighteenth century, the era we have come to know as the Enlightenment, another 4,5000,000 Africans were forced to leave their home continent for a life of brutal enslavement in plantations on the other side of the Atlantic.  See https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates. "

Published: 2022  Read: September 2022  Genre: History

Learning to Live - Theresa Cameron

 Sub-title: A Black Woman's Journey Beyond Foster Care

This is the concluding memoir of Theresa, who died in 2012, possibly due to heart problems.  

Her voice is one of someone who never was able to function fully in society because of the scars left from growing up in foster care.  It's a sad story to read.  While she triumphed over her fears to obtain a PhD from Harvard in Urban Design and became an associate professor at Arizona State University, after the book;s publication she was fired from ASU in a controversial decision and died a few years later.  

Published: 2009  Read: August 2022  Genre: Memoir, Auto-biography

How the World Really Works - Vaclav Smil

 Sub-title: The Science Behind How We Got Here and Where We're Going

This book is described as "an essential analysis of modern science and technology" and what science can and cannot do.  I enjoyed reading the author's explanation of complex interaction of what he identifies as the "four pillars of modern civilization" - 1) ammonia (because of its importance in creating nitrogen fertilizers), 2) plastics, 3) steel and 4) concrete.  He makes a convincing argument that because our modern civilization could not function without these nor will we be able to eliminate or replace them in the near future, we are unlikely to see a resolution of issues with food production and climate change.  

I'd hoped for an inspiring prediction of how these issues could be solved but there was no such conclusion.  It was a sobering read.

Quote:

"Marine Traffic website ...for tracking worldwide shipping and aviation traffic."

[Regarding the future of food production] "...and reduced meat consumption would be the single-most important adjustment as it would lower the need for producing feed grains..."

Published: 2022  Read: August 2022 Genre: Science, Philosophy

The End of Genetics - David B Goldstein

Sub-title: Designing humanity's DNA

This was a startling book, with a perspective on the use of DNA for choosing the genes of children before birth.  I marked multiple pages.  The summary is that we will be able to alter the genetics prenatal before we have established whether we should, and if we do, for what reasons.  The author points out that as of now we are a long way from knowing the consequences of such changes. He even mentions sequencing the entire population as a way to "position the country to be more resilient in the face of future global health crises".  

p.7 - "If we consider only point mutations then each child born will have its own collection of brand-new mutations...between fifty and a few hundred...distributed throughout his or her genome, with the exact number depending very strongly on the age of the father."

p. 13 - "Alistair Moffat is the former chief executive officer of Britain's DNA, a now-defunct for-profit personal genomics company.[example of ridiculous claims]"

p. 23 "...437 genes [mendelian disease] that are known to cause diseases that are severe and present in childhood if a child carries two mutations.  'Screening for such mutations in people and prospective parents is now called carrier screening'."

p. 44 "...all four thousand genes that we now know about that cause severe inherited disease follow [Mendelian] pattern of inheritance."

p.59 "...the modern Synthesis, which unites Mendelian inheritance and Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection and the Central Dogma, which describe the flow of information from DNA through RNA to the proteins responsible for the diversity of organisms on earth."

p. 94 "...polygenic risk scores ..are based on the complement of common variation an individual carries."

p. 108 "There will clearly be a very substantial market among prospective parents for any tools that can ensure the non-transmissions of variants causing disease that cannot be comprehensively cured."

p. 113 "Today we know of 1,488 genes that cause disease following a dominant mode of inheritance."

p. 117 "...it has been estimated that as many as two out of every hundred people carry a disease-causing mutation in one of these 'actionable' genes."

Published: 2021  Read: August 2022  Genre: Science

In Praise of Good Bookstores - Jeff Deutsch

 The author is the manager of the Seminary Co-Op, a bookstore started in 1961in the basement of  the Chicago Theological Seminary and moved in 2012 to a building in Hyde Park, Illinois. In 2014 the author succeeded the long time manager Jack Celia.

The book is a loving tribute to bookstores and booksellers.  Many independent bookstores are referenced throughout.  Deutsch liberally peppers the book with literary references, giving one the feeling of a deep conversation with a knowledgeable caretaker of all things books. 

He describes the deliberate environment created by booksellers and the different personalities that wander their bookstores and lauds the value of browsing a bookstore as its greatest contribution to society.

This was a quirky, high brow read.

Quotes:

p 25 - "...browsing is a form of rumination.  Books, like the leaves and shrubs known as the browsage, provide ruminant-readers with their nutrients."

p 50 - "In 1931, the mathematician S.R. Ranganathan...coined the term 'library science' and proposed the ..Five Laws of Library Science.  1.  Books are for use. 2. Every reader his or her book.  3. Every book its reader. 4. Save the time of the reader. 5. The library is a growing organism."

p. 64 - [Jorge Luis] Borges, was appointed director of the National Library of Argentina in 1955 almost simultaneously with his immersion into' the dark world and wide', the blindness passed down to him from his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, all of whom died blind."

p. 100 - "The most important things in the world seem impossible to measure.  We have as yet, a Carlyle said, no scale to measure admiration by.  And we have as yet no scale for measuring meaning, knowledge, hope, pleasure, reverence, curiosity, beauty, kindness, awe, justice, wisdom, and love."

p. 118 - "We readers have felt the companionship of books, and many of us have found ourselves at a loss to explain to the underliterate among us the power and nourishment we receive from our books."

Published: 2022  Read: July 2022 Genre: History

Uprooted - Peter J Boni

 Sub-title: Family trauma, unknown origins, and the secretive history of artificial insemination

This was a great read.  The author discovered in his 50's that he was conceived via artificial insemination, something that was being experimented with in the 1940s when he was born. He goes on a quest to find his birth father and in the process records the history of AI and its unregulated use over decades.  

Quotes:

"Year's before, I had taken a Myers-Briggs personality test...the leadership profile, ENTJ: Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging....only 2% of the population has this profile."

"Isabella [Queen of Spain] became one of the most powerful and influential European monarchs...During her reign, the International Federation of Chess, the governing authority of the game, restructured the rules.  While the king remained the most important, the queen (modeled after Queen Isabella), moved freely in any direction and became the most powerful piece on the board."

"Based on [June 1941 survey of 30,000 doctors] ...estimated that artificial insemination accounted for as many as 10,000 births, with approximately two-thirds resulting from artificial insemination by husband and one-third from an artificial insemination by donor."

"In England, in post-war 1945, Dr. Mary Bardon documented...successful artificial insemination by donor and later revealed as many as 1,500 donor-conceived children in the U.K. ...she subsequently disclosed that one anonymous donor, her husband and fellow fertility researcher Bertold Wiesner, accounted for six hundred of those children. (Wiesner occupies the number-one Wikipedia spot for having fathered the most children)." 

"The American Society for Reproductive Medicine...publishes Fertility and Sterility...recommends a series of practice standards to be followed by its fertility practitioners... "

"The Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, drafted in 1968, and the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act have established standards for organ and tissue donation in the US.  Yet, there is no such governing body establishing laws and standards in the life-giving multi-billion-dollar reproduction industry.  ..[it is] totally unaddressed by US federal law."

" Professional fertility specialists generally belong to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology (SART).  By 1988, the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendment (CLIA) required all clinical laboratory testing on humans in the U.S. to adhere to stringent standards."  

"First, a guideline is not enforceable; a law is.  Second, the free market distribution of not only sperm but also egg and embryo enables a multitude of unknowing siblings to be conceived from the same donor." 

 

Published: 2022  Read: July 2022  Genre: Memoir

The Power - Naomi Alderman

 

This was a good read and a sobering, thoughtful vision of a future where the tables are turned.

Young women begin finding they have the power, the ability to send electric shocks from their fingertips.  They can awaken this power in older women and men don't have it.  We're taken through years of a new world order where women are the dominant gender, the ones dictating, ordering, the ones in control and discover what type of world evolves.

It took me awhile to understand the perspective of the book as it starts in some present moment, a man discussing his historical novel with his editor/friend and then into that book that looks back thousands of years to the beginning of the power.  I liked the premise and the way the author makes you think not just in our own life timeframe.

Quotes:

"Nothing that either of these men says is really of any great significance, because she could kill them in three moves before they stirred in their comfortably padded chairs.  It doesn't matter that she shouldn't, that she never would.  What matters is that she could, if she wanted.  The power to hurt is a kind of wealth."

Published:  2016  Read: July 2022 Genre: Science Fiction

Know My Name - Chanel Miller

 

This book was difficult to read as it tells the true life experience of a young woman raped while unconscious who is further harmed when her attacker is prosecuted.  But it is much more than that.  Chanel Miller remained anonymous until four years after the attack.  Brock Allen Taylor had brutally attacked her outside at a party and was caught in the act by "two Swedes" walking by.  He was convicted of 3 of the 5 sexual assault counts brought against him and only served two months.  Chanel's victim impact statement was released under her anonymous name used in the trial and went viral, reaching millions of readers, revealing the impact of the attack and its aftermath on her life, her family and friends.  She wrote this book in 2019 and has become an advocate for victims of sexual violence.

Quotes:

"You have to hold out to see how your life unfolds, because it is most likely beyond what you can imagine.  It is not a question of if you will survive this, but what beautiful things await you when you do."

"We named our dog Mogu (Chinese for mushroom).  Every day she reminds me of the Muttville slogan:  It's never to late for a new beginning.  It was a promise to her and a promise to myself.  Whatever past you came from, you don't have to go back."

"It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something.  Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place.  I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving."

Published:  2019  Read: June 2022 Genre: Memoir

A Broken Tree - Stephen F Anderson

 Sub-title: How DNA exposed a family's secrets

This is the story of the type of unexpected results that can be found with DNA testing.  The author, a long-time employee of FamilySearch, the genealogy powerhouse, suspected that he and his siblings were not all of the same parents, and DNA testing proved his suspicions.  I was struck by his seeming lack of knowledge of DNA testing for someone who worked in the genealogy industry.  He began testing of YDNA and proceeded cautiously as the years went on, being mindful of the feelings of his parents and siblings.  A mindful example of the issues that arise with DNA testing.

Published: 2019   Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

Purge - Sofi Oksanen

 This was a dark story.  It covers the experience of the women in one family in Estonia (a county I had to look up to find out where it was) throughout its troubled history of war and occupation, from about 1920's to the present.  Some chose to stay during the period; others were forced to live elsewhere and others were born during it.  Their experience and intertwined relationships are revealed as the story unfolds.  I liked how the author slowly revealed their ties.  Their stories were painful and horrific with the choices they made to survive.

Published: 2008  Read: June 2022  Genre: Fiction, Historical

Foster Care Odyssey - Theresa Cameron

 Sub-title: A black girl's story

While travelling this summer, I picked this up at a campground book exchange.  Serendipitously, this story of a woman raised from birth in the foster care system is the story of an adoptee whose mother left her with Catholic charities and who never knew her father.  The author survived this system, barely, and went on to get her doctorate from Harvard.  

I learned a lot about how the foster care system operates and the impact on children.  Inadvertently, I think, the author's writing revealed the guarded, stilted communication style that came from an unstable, unpredictable childhood.

I wanted to see if she ever found her father so I researched her. Therese Cameron wrote a second book about her struggles in her adult life Learning to Live: A Black Woman's Journey Beyond Foster Care.

But, I also found that she was fired from Arizona State University for alleged plagiarism of a syllabus, and sued and lost a discrimination case that she brought as the root cause of her firing.  After losing the case in 2011, she died in 2012 and I've yet to find any genealogical records of her death.  

I ordered her 2nd book ...review to come.

Published: 2002  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir

The Innovators - Walter Isaacson

 Sub-title: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

Before genealogy absorbed my attention, I spent time being a computer geek, a useful passion for my genealogy pursuits.  This book chronicles the rise of the computer and internet revolution, from Ada Lovelace through Jobs, Gate, and the internet gurus of today.  I re-lived the evolution of the machines and applications that I learned and used through out the late 70s, through the 80's and 90's.  I found myself being nostalgic for the sound a a dial-up modem and the black c:> screen.

It took me forever to get through this, at least a couple months, as other books distracted me.  

A thought I played with after reading multiple books by Isaacson is if an author has ever written a historical account of the evolution of housekeeping and the role of women in society.  

Quotes:

"Using Hollerith's tabulators, the 1890 census was completed in one year rather than eight.  It was the first major use of electrical circuits to process information...the company he founded became... IBM."

"Life is made up of a whole concentration of trivial matters he [J Presper Eckert] once said.  Certainly a computer is nothing but a huge concentration of trivial matters."

"...the main lesson to draw from the birth of computers is that innovation is usually a group effort, involving collaboration between visionaries and engineers, and that creativity comes from drawing on many sources."

"...the sparks come from ideas rubbing against each other...questioning, listening, genly floating tentative proposals, articulating, and collating..."

"There was a key lesson for innovation: understand which industries are symbiotic so that you can capitalize on how they will spur each other on."

"[talking about Steve Jobs using PARC] Once again, the greatest innovation would come not from the people who created the breakthroughs but from the people who applied them usefully."

"The hacker corps that grew up around GNS and Linux showed that emotional incentives, beyond financial rewards, can motivate voluntary collaboration."

"[Williams, founder of Blogger] Connecting into a community is one of the basic desires that drive the digital world."

"Having a healthy disregard for the impossible"

"Baidu, which became that country's [China's] largest search engine and one of Google's most powerful global competitors."

"...the future might belong to people who can best partner and collaborate with computers."

Published: 2014  Read: April - June 2022 Genre: History

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Motherhood - Shelia Heti

My sister suggested this a few years ago and I finally got to it.  The authors chose a unique way of writing, using 3 coin flips to answer 'yes' or 'no' and responding based on the result of the coin flip.  She leads us through several years of trying to decide if she wants to have children before her biological clock runs out.  The story read like a stream of consciousness as she struggles with the expectations and norms of society and her own personal desires.  A good read.

Quotes:

"What is the better thing to steer your life by? Whatever seems to bring happiness? Yes.  So your values, happiness and the things the people around you need.  Those are he things by which you should steer your life."

"I have only two choices: to trust him or be suspicious of him; to believe in him or to doubt.  Then I ought to make the choice to trust him, because what good does it do me to be suspicious or to doubt?  That is causing myself pain in advance of any real pain."

"Happiness and joy are feeling like you belong to the world, and are at home in the world, at the level of nature, humanity and time."

"And you are never lonely while writing, I thought, it's impossible to be--categorically impossible--because writing is a relationship.  You're in a relationship with some force that is more mysterious than yourself."

"Only when a woman is no longer attractive to men, can she be left alone for enough moments to actually think."

Published: 2018  Read: June 2022  Genre: Memoir/Philosophy 

Origin - Jennifer Raff

 Sub-title: A Genetic History of the Americas

I've been reading recently published books addressing genetics and DNA.  This one came to my attention in my social media feed and I had to wait several weeks for it to be available at the library.

The author is an anthropologist and geneticist with the University of Kansas.  While she is letting the research on ancient remains tell the story of how the Americas may have bee populated, her larger message is that the scientific community and the general public needs to seek out and respect the Native Americans who are the modern descendants of the peoples they study and research and that we should be collaborating with them, as she does.

I enjoyed the summary of the science to date, the history of the finds and analysis of the on-site anthropological materials as well as the laboratory work done to analyze DNA.  A good read that brought into perspective the studies being done to trace our human family.  I will be interested to see what fellow genealogists who have researched Native American DNA think of her book.

Quotes:

p. 150 - She provides an explanation of extensive lab procedures for cleanliness and to avoid contamination as "...a contract between ourselves [scientists] and the Indigenous peoples who have given us permission to conduct this work" that demonstrates the ethics of anthropology and genetics.

p. 198 - She describes the parallels between the evolution of dogs as contributing to being "...able to get insights into human story from an unexpected source: the genomes of dogs."

p. 256 - "...the Common Rule, which underlies ethical oversight of research on humans (governed by Institutional Review Boards or IRBs) does not apply to ancient humans.  NAGPRA, the law the governs human remains and artifacts associated with descendant tribe, does not apply to the remains of ancient people found on private property."

p. 261 - "For Indigenous peoples this [Native American heritage] is not a minor or abstract issue; giving legitimacy to the notion that one can claim Native identify via a DNA test or family legend without any connection to present-day tribes is an implicit threat to tribal sovereignty....Because of widespread interest ...commercial ancestry testing services are intensely focused on obtaining Native American DNA from tribal members...met with a fair amount of resistance.  The marketing of ancestor test as "telling you who you are" is not accurate.  It boils down to this - what makes a person Indigenous is not a subject on which I- or any other non-Native geneticist- can speak with any authority or knowledge."

Published: 2022  Read: May 2022  Genre: Science

Ancestor Trouble - Maud Newton

 Sub-title: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation
This was a fascinating read!  The author weaves stories of her lives into the history of genealogy and her family.  It's a rolling journey connecting epigenetics, genograms, forced sterilization, neuroscience, DNA, kinship and even spiritual practices that reflect our family ties over the generations.   

Quotes:

p. 50 "As of 2019, 23andMe's data set for sub-Saharan African ancestry relies on only 1,980 reference individuals...1,634 Central and South Asian...Europeans..6,328."

p. 51 "...African Ancestry, a Black-owned site with more than 30,000 Indigenous African DNA samples."

[Note: invalid comparison I noted to author and she replied she would review and correct]

p. 66 "...any genomic predictions that were removed from the outward-facing, customer perspective are still available to 23andMe - and its investors."

p.67 "Daniela Hernandez...Splinter..Ancestry has been collecting ancestral data about its users for decades."

p. 68 "empathy gene...has never been incorporated into 23andMe's own results (GG at Rs53576)"

p.143 "[Craig] Venter conceded in his 2007 memoir, A Life Decoded, Genes are not the whole story."

p.185 "Emotional recurrences in families...I often think family patterns are the primary existential conundrum we all have incommon, apart from death and basic needs like food and shelter.."

p. 187 "Touched by Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison...the particular type of family tree that populates Jamison's book is called a genogram (or sometimes a genosociogram).  These graphs can be useful for mapping traits through families but are similar to those used for pedigrees generated by the Eugenic Record Office...in 1910."

p. 234 "...so many of us spend our lives struggling with or against our ancestors' dreams without knowing precisely how or why."

Published: 2022  Read: May 2022  Genre: Memoir

Little Heathens - Mildred Armstrong Kalish

I picked this up at a used book store for a road trip.  Mildred tells the story of growing up in the 1930s on  her family farm in Iowa.  It was a lot of hard work, never-ending chores and reminiscing.  It was charming and nostalgic.  Not well written but a lot of details of life in the 1930s and how it shaped her life.

Published: 2007  Read: May 2022  Genre: Auto-biography 

DNA for Native American Genealogy - Roberta Estes

 This book is a much needed volume addressing the use of DNA analysis along with genealogical research to identify and verify native american heritage.  It's divided into 6 parts:

Part 1: Seeking Native Ancestors

Part 2: Ethnicity and Population Genetics - a good explanation of how this is done

Part 3: DNA Testing

Part 4: MtDNA

Part 5: Y-DNA ancient and modern

Part 6: Roadmap and checklist

There are many tables accompanying each topic, making it an excellent reference when pursuing DNA for Native American research.  Highly recommended.

Published: 2021  Read: April 2022 Genre: Genealogy

me and white supremacy - Layla F Saad

 I read this book for a reading club seeking to understand our biases and beliefs around race.  It's written as a series of thoughtful, progressive essays followed by questions to be answered in writing where you reflect on the reading and your experiences with the topic.  The author's state that "the primary force that drives my work is a passionate desire to become a good ancestor" - by which she means to "seed new possibilities for those who will come after I am gone."

The author shares the definition of white supremacy as "a racist ideology that is based upon the belief that white people are superior in many ways to people of other races and that therefore, white people should be dominant over other races".  It explores not only the belief but its impact on organizations, societies and institutions in a culture.  The book looks at how this is manifested and experienced at a personal and individual level.

I admit this was a difficult book to work through and I'm glad I had the support of a study group.

Quotes:

"...when we don't agree with the answers we have demanded, we all too often feel qualified to dismiss them."

p. 212 - the Circle Way by Christina Baldwin and Ann Linnea

p. 178 - White feminism is an extension of white supremacy.  It is only concerned with white women gaining parity with white men.

Published: 2020  Read: April 2022  Genre: Sociology, Non-Fiction

Tiny Habits - B J Fogg

Sub-title: The Small Changes that Change Everything

I succumb too frequently to self-help books which if I practiced what I read instead of just reading might have an effect.  I didn't finish this one, it was too simplistic and repetitive.

Published: 2020  Read: April 2022

The Heir Hunter - Chris Larsgaard

 My friend, Alice, recommended this one to me and she was actually the inspiration for one of the characters, Alex (Alexandria), who is one of the private investigators seeking out heirs for unclaimed inheritances.  It was a quick and entertaining read and I didn't figure out the mystery in advance which is a good thing!  I enjoyed re-visiting the ways people were located and family histories were built only 20 years ago...we've come such a long way from the days of digging through city directories in libraries (now online on multiple sites) and going to courthouses to retrieve birth, marriage and death records.  I was nostalgic for the first-hand evidence they collected by travelling to the source.

Alex and her boss, Nick are looking for heirs to a multi-million dollar inheritance and instead find a suspicious trail of coverup and intrigue.  They work together to sleuth out the puzzle pieces of who the deceased may be related to and where those people can be found.  To complicate matters, others are also looking for the heirs, and not for good reasons.  A fun and quick read.

Published: 2000  Read: April 2022  Genre: Mystery

Moonshot - Albert Bourla

 Sub-title: Inside Pfizer's Nin-Month Race to Make the Impossible Possible

I'm an optimist, and this book supported my search for positive information about the pandemic. Dr Bourla is the chairman and CEO of Pfizer pharmaceutical company.  The book is his first person account of the development of the coronavirus at the fastest pace ever for a vaccine.  I was impressed with how the world coordinated their efforts in science, manufacturing, distribution and investment to develop the vaccine.  

Some may critically say the companies that developed the vaccine made lots of money and I call foul.  As commercial entities, yes, they will make huge profits; however, as the book illustrates, they also took huge risks in choosing the development path and ignoring financial concerns in favor of pursuing the best path for development.

The company adopted the phrase "Science Will Win" and we should all be grateful that it did.

Published: 2021  Read: March 2022  Genre: Science, History

This is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel

 This was a hard book to read.  It's the story of Claude/Poppy and his/her family.  The youngest of 5 boys, Claude sees himself as a girl.  His loving, caring parents are determined to accept him as he/she chooses and he navigates kindergarten with his gender diaspora supported by the school administration and unremarked by his classmates.  That is, until he's separated from his best friend who has a homophobic father with a gun.  His mother, a doctor, and his father, a writer, move the family to a "friendly" state and he starts school as Poppy.  At 10, a few years older, she's "outed" after years of her family keeping the secret.  Like any pre-teen, she has to navigate her reality in a world not necessarily accepting of who she is.

While my heart ached for her and her parents, it was a moving, honest, and enlightening story of the life a transgender child.  The author has a transgender child herself but the book is a fictionalized version of the many obstacles faced and solutions her and her family have created.  Highly recommended.

Quotes:

"...children being the enemies of plans and also the enemies of anything new besides themselves."

"They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is the hardest to live without."

"He realized this was what his father hand been up to all these years, not entertaining his children [with his stories] but perfecting his world.  If you wrote your own characters, they didn't disappoint you like real people did.  If you told your own story, you got to pick your ending.  Just being yourself never worked, but if you made yourself up, you to go be exactly who you knew yourself. to be."

"All life.  You are never finish, never done.  Never become, always becoming.  You know?  Life is change so is always okay you are not there yet".

"...this was what stilled for her, smooth and clear as glass.  Dispelling fear.  Taming what was scary not by hiding it, not by blocking it or burying it, not by keeping it secret, but by reminding themselves and everyone else, to chose love, choose openness, to think and be calm.  That there were more ways than just two, wider possibilities than hidden or betrayed, stalled or brokenhearted, male or female, right or wrong.  Middle ways.  Ways beyond."

Published: 2017   Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction

Poison for Breakfast - Lemony Snicket

 

This was cute and quirky.  The main character finds a note under his door that says "you had poison for breakfast".  We goes on a journey to find out how and why and when and in the process reflects on life in all its bewildering glory.  

Published: 2021  Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction, Philosophy

In Five Years - Rebecca Serle

A young, successful, woman lawyer (Dannie), engaged to the perfect, considerate man (David) experiences her future one evening - and she's with a different man, in a different place.  She's shaken to her core and we she meets that future man (Aaron) she's convinced she can alter the future.  This was a clever take on predestination and what we think we can control in our lives.  I finished it up in a  couple days. Her relationship with her best friend since childhood (Bella) plays counterpoint to her structured, managed life.

Clever, quick read.

Quote:

"You mistake love.  You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't.  It's the only thing that does not need to become at all.  It matters only insofar as it exists.  Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future."

Published:  2020 Read: March 2022  Genre: Fiction

Living with Our Genes - Dean Hamer and Peter Copeland

I picked up this book at the genealogical society in Green Valley, Arizona. They were clearing out their collection of older books and duplicates and I picked up a bunch!  Reading older published works highlights the progress that's been made over the past 20 plus years since this book was released.  The scientist, Dean Hamer, is a cancer researcher from Harvard and still operates a program doing genetic research.  He was controversial, claiming he had identified genes that may be associated with sexual orientation and intelligence.  The books's claims are considered glib and over-generalizations, but at the time were quite sensational, much like the claims of early 19th century snake oil salesman.  Not worth reading except for a gaining a perspective on how science evolves and can be exploited on the way.

Published: 1998  Read: March 2022  Genre: Science

There's A Hole in my Bucket - Royd Tolkien

 Sub-title: A Journey of Two Brothers

This was a delightful find, and a moving story of sibling love and support.  Royd is the great-grandson of R.R. Tolkien, author of the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings books.  He and his brother Mike grow up in the countryside of Wales, inseparable.  Mike is the daredevil, Royd the steady-as-she-goes, cautious one.

Mike is struck with a horrible incurable and terminal disease, ALS, or as Royd refers to it, motor neurone disease.  Mike leaves a "bucket list" for Royd to complete as a journey through his grief and remembrance of his brother.  The story was documented in a film too.  Uplifting and inspiring.

Published: 2021  Read: February 2022  Genre: Memoir

Bless Your Heart, Tramp - Celia Riverbark

 I'd tried to find another book by this author and wasn't successful, so I tried this one.  It's a bit dated with references to old technology and cultural references of the prior decade.  The author is a columnist for a southern publication and this appears to be a collection of her previous articles.  It's stories of southern life from a woman's perspective, poking fun and reveling in their traditions.  A cute read, bless her heart.

Published: 2000  Read: February 2022  Genre: Humor

The Making of the Atomic Bomb - Richard Rhodes

 I should get a medal for reading this one!  It was 749 pages of a very detailed chronology of the making of the atomic bomb. The book received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The story starts with the scientists who discovered, experimented, and refined the techniques necessary, beginning in 1933, and up and through the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945.  

I admit I glazed over on some parts where the chemistry, physics and mechanics were described and illustrated.  It isn't required to read and understand the technical parts.  What I took away from this book was the astonishing coordination capability of great minds of science to pursue a curiosity that turned into a reality and then to struggle with the solemn impact of that discovery on the world.  

I was also struck by the interplay of science, politics and the military to achieve a goal that they thought would save lives while at the same time acknowledging the destructive force being unleashed. The competition between warring nations and the way in which each country corralled their best scientists and military strategists was impressive.  It made me think about the efforts being made now to advance science, such as with Crispr in biology and Blockchain technology in finance.

An inspirational, horrifying and sobering historical account well worth the read.

Quotes:

"Becoming a scientist is necessarily an act of profound commitment to the scientific system and the scientific world view....They constituted a republic of educated believers taught through a chain of master and apprentices to judge carefully the slippery edges of their work."

"The best way to do the job, was to allow each worker to keep track of what every other worker was doing.  Let them work on putting the puzzle together in the sight of the others, so that every time a piece of it is fitted in by one, all the others will immediately watch out for the next step that becomes possible in the consequence. That way, even though each worker acts on his own initiative, he acts to further the entire group's achievement.  The group works independently together; the puzzle is assembled in the most efficient way."

"In 1516 a rich silver lode was discovered in Joachimsthal (in the Ore Mountains in Germany] ...in 1519 coins were first struck from its silver and named 'Joachimsthaler', shortened to thaler, and became 'dollar' in English before 1600."

"Rutherford [Ernest Rutherford, New Zealand physicist, known as the father of nuclear physics] was elevated to baron in...1931. Trismegistus, the Egyptian god of wisdom who was supposed to have written alchemical books...was on his crest."

"The Japanese physics colloquium...had decided in March 1943 that an atomic bomb was possible but not practically attainable. ...The Japanese assessment...overestimated the difficult of isotope separation and underestimated U.S. industrial capacity.  It also...underestimated American dedication.  Collective dedication was a pattern of Japanese culture more than of American. But Americans could summon it when challenged, and couple it with resources of talent and capital unmatched anywhere else in the world."

Published: 1986  Read: February 2022 Genre: History

The Judge's List - John Grisham

An attorney in the Judicial section of conduct is contacted by a woman who claims her father was murdered by a sitting judge and that the judge is a serial killer. Good read about two thirds of the way and then the usual Grisham wrap up where our heroine almost gets killed and the good guys win, sort of.

 Published:  2021  Read: February 2022 Genre: Mystery

Immediate Family - Ashley Nelson Levy

This was a tender, thoughtful book of a sister writing a speech to her adopted brother for his wedding. I enjoyed it as it was the first time I had read about adoptees from the adopting family's perspective and especially from that of their natural born siblings.  I don't recall the speaker revealing her name...she addresses her brother, Danny, in a dreamy, reflective way.  He came into her life when she was about nine years old, adopted from Thailand as a three year old.  We learn of his struggles being adopted and different in the American white family he joins.

There were long passages where she reflects on how adoptees and orphans are portrayed in literature and the rescuing role given to them: Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, Mowgli in The Jungle Book, Batman and Robin, Tarzan. A good read that I would recommend.

Quotes:

"...because change is always tethered to some kind of departure, some send-off to a life you knew"

...how can silence ever be the better, more loving alternative?"

"Love isn't bound up in food...love is primary, attachment is primary, we're not conditioned to love merely because someone feeds us.  We love certain people and we need them to love us back."

Published:  2021  Read January 2022  Genre: Fiction 

The Wife Between Us - Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen

This was a clever, page-turner that I finished in 3 evenings.  A first wife mourns the loss of her husband and begins stalking his soon-to-be new wife.  There are twists and turns that make this a good read to the very end.

Published: 2017  Read: January 2022  Genre: Fiction, Mystery

Easy Crafts for the Insane - Kelly Williams Brown

Sub-title: A mostly funny memoir of mental illness & making things

The successful author of Adulting spills all about her struggles with bipolar disorder and a very bad year where she gets divorced, her father is diagnosed with cancer and she breaks both arms.  A tough read and brave recounting of the impact of mental illness.

The author explains how simple crafts helped her through the struggles and illuminates the reality of living with the condition.  Funny and moving book.

Quotes:

"It would be great (both narratively and, um, for my life) if there were some fixed finish line [to mental health illness].  And I had crossed it. And now I was Better, Forever, and You Could Be, Too.  This is not the nature of anything, though.  There is not a beginning, a middle, and an end.  It's a constand coaxing, reinforced with boundaries and medication.  ..."It is patiently asking myself the same questions: 'Can you do anything about his right now?  Should you?"

"[On losing her girlfriends] Someone on Reddit once said that when you break up with someone, you lose the language you've cultivated just between yourselves."

Published:  2021  Read: January 2022 Genre: Memoir

The Hare with Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal

 Sub-title: A Hidden Inheritance

This was a dreamy, meandering book for my first read of the New Year.  The author is a descendant of the Ephrussi Family, a very wealthy banking dynasty that originated in Russia in the mid-1800s and expanded across Paris, Vienna and Britain.  The business was taken over in Austria by the Nazis and the family scattered across the globe. Throughout that timeframe, one of the author's great-uncles collected Japanese netsukes, small, intricate carvings that served as buttons to secure a man's kimono.  Edmund traces the path of these treasures he eventually inherits and along the way unveils the family history.

I loved how he used letters, official records, family stories and reminiscences to weave together the art and family.  I read the version with pictures of the netsukes and family photos that made what would have been a historical accounting into a fascinating, melancholy tale of a time, a place and a family.

The author is a renowned ceramic pottery artist and his eye for art and craftsmanship carries over to his descriptions of the characters and their lives.  I found it a fascinating read.

Published: 2010  Read: January 2022  Genre: Memoir