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