Your Money or Your Life - Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin

I think I first read this life changing book back in 1996; it may have been even earlier.  It was written in 1992 at the height of the "greed" decade, those years when it was all about making more, getting more, having more.  It influenced my thinking ever since.

Joe Dominguez was a wall street financial analyst who retired at 31 years of age.  He and Vicki championed the idea of financial independence or "FI".  They have a detailed step by step plan from starting out with understanding how much you *really* are earning and what you are selling your life energy for to suggestions for investing in treasury bonds (not so lucrative these days, but still secure and paying).  Their steps to FI are succinctly:
1) reduce and keep your expenses to what you need
2) save the rest of what you earn
3) invest your savings in income producing assets

When the income from your savings cover your expenses you will have reached FI. Basically, you end up paying yourself.

Their approach was more than just about money.  It was about living sustainably and looking inside of yourself for fulfillment, rather than consuming and buying to soothe yourself.

Some notes I made back when I first read the book:

p 26    Beyond enough is clutter
p 28    Clutter is also meaningless activities, like TV, that add nothing to your life
p 35    Once you're above the survival level the difference between prosperity and poverty is simply in our degree of gratitude.
           *Money is what we trade for our life energy.
p 232  Breaking the link between wages and work - I'm paid to work as a manager, but I am a ____(fill in the blank)?  What do I love?
Your worth comes from who you are and what you give.  The real sign of success is the inner knowing that you achieved what you set out to do.

I felt so strongly about these principles that I made a practice of giving the book as a gift at graduations and weddings, much to the chagrin of my family, I suppose.  Money seems to be the last taboo subject, when it should be something we educate our children on early and often and discuss with friends and family what works and what doesn't in getting to financial independence because who wants to work their whole life?

I still pick up copies when I find them in used bookstores.  Read it and see if it doesn't put you on a different path too.

Published: 1992  Read: 1996, 2000, 2015  Genre: Non-fiction, finance

H is for Hawk - Helen Macdonald

This is the best book I have read in a long, long time.  It's a memoir of an English woman studying at Cambridge.  Her father dies suddenly and to deal with her grief, she decides to train a goshawk, a large predatory bird.  She was fascinated with birds from an early age and had become a falconer and trained other hunting birds in the past.  The goshawk is considered difficult to train and she wanted a challenge.  She interweaves the writings on the subject of training a goshawk by the author of The Once and Future King, T. H. White with her journey through her grief accompanied by the goshawk.  
Her book is part memoir, part natural history lesson, part biography.  It sounds strange and odd and even unappealing.  Yet the way she describes the world after losing her father, her relationship with the goshawk, who she names "Mabel", and her analysis of T.H.White's book, The Goshawk, are remarkably rich fascinating and moving.

Some quotes I marked that illustrate her power of description.

"I thought about the book [The Goshawk] cautiously, ran my feelings over it the way you feel for a hurting tooth with your tongue."

"The hawk is on my fist.  Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket..."

[On her child-age reaction to reading a critical review of The Goshawk and T.H.White by the falconers' community]

"I was on the right side, was allowed to dislike this grown-up [the author] and consider him a fool.  It's painful to recall my relief on reading this [the review], founded as it was on a desperate misunderstanding about the size of the world.  I took comfort in the blithe superiority that is the refuge of the small."

"Now that Dad was gone I was starting to see how mortality was bound up in things like that cold, arc-lit sky.  How the world is full of signs and wonders that come, and go, and if you are lucky you might see them.  Once, twice.  Perhaps never again."

She isolates herself from other people and submerges in the hawk's world.  She is suffering and wants to be more hawk-like:  aloof, unmovable, independent.

" 'We are outsiders now, Mabel,' I say, and the thought is not unpleasant.  But I feel ashamed of my nation's reticence.  Its desire to keep walking, to move on, not to comment, not to interrogate, not to take any interest in something peculiar, unusual, in anything that isn't entirely normal."

She begins to realize she is slipping, depressed, unable to shake her sadness.

"We carry the lives we've imagined as we carry the lives we have, and sometimes a reckoning comes of all the lives we have lost."

As she gets help and begins to see a way forward she reflects:

"There is a time in life when you expect the world to be always full of new things.  And then comes a day when you realise that is not how it will be at all.  You see that life will become a thing made of holes.  Absences.  Losses.  Things that were there and are no longer.  And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps, though you can put your hand out to where things were and feel that tense, shining dullness of the space where the memories are."

The hawk has taught her things:

"Of all the lessons I've learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there - rock and trees and ...all the things that ...fly.  They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own view of the world.  In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not."

A wonderfully written, different and daring book.

Published: 2014  Read August 2015  Genre: Memoir

ISBN: 9 780802 12341

Same Time Next Week - Leo Gutkind

Sub-title: True stories of working through mental illness

Leo Gutkind is the editor of this group of essays from therapists and patients dealing with mental illness that I picked up from the library.  I want to see if I can take a class from Gutkind since he teaches at ASU, one motivation for reading this book.

I found the contrast of the therapist's viewpoint and the patients worthwhile insight and would recommend the book for anyone touched by mental disease.  One theme is clear; regardless of the therapy, therapist, patient or diagnosis, dealing with mental illness is most successful when compassion and human connection is the priority.

One therapist early in the book sums it up, saying:

"...some people benefit greatly from a good therapist; some from finding the right medication; some, from a seemingly spontaneous improvements; some, from a combination of the above.  Having a loving and responsive mother or significant parental figures seems to be preventive, having a loving and caring adult partner is restorative.  Progress seldom comes in a straight line: courage determination, and patience are required in large measure."

I learned from another writer that a mother having the flu during pregnancy is a risk for schizophrenia:

"...up to 14% of schizophrenia cases would not have occurred had influenza in early to mid-pregnancy been avoided, and the viruses and other infections in the first trimester of pregnancy could increase schizophrenia risk as much as 700%."

Some authors provided suggestions for connecting to someone suffering with mental illness that I thought was good advice for any interaction when trying to empathize:

"When John introduced himself by saying, 'I am not a schizophrenic,' I didn't confront the odd statement by saying, 'Are you concerned about being called a schizophrenic?'  Instead, I attempted to join him by saying, 'I am not a noun either.'  I wanted to relate rather than confront." [my emphasis added].

There was a story about the effects of exposure to violence, even on TV or video games is harming because the "images seem to remain long active in the brain:

"...watching horror films lead to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder in many young persons.  Many of these symptoms can linger for decades."

One of the last stories makes a meaningful point:

"every time we fall in love or make a friend, hold someone tight or choose a muffin, get pregnant or buy new underwear, paint a room or eat a sandwich; every choice we make to stay, to treat ourselves as valuable people, to connect more and more with this thing that can end only in loss, in death, loneliness, holey underwear or shit; every time we choose connection, we are risking loss.  But every time we do not chose connection, we are ensuring it."


Published:     Read: June-July 2015  Genre: Non-fiction

ISBN:9 781937 163198

The Seven Daughters of Eve - Bryan Sykes

Sub-title: The Science that reveals our genetic ancestry

I ordered this via Amazon because it was a layman's description of how mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is passed down from mother's to their children.  Daughters pass it on to their daughters and the author contends that it remains relatively unaltered for thousands of years.  The record of his research and findings was fascinating and I hope to do a mtDNA test someday.  He goes into detail of how mitochondrial genetics, classified all modern Europeans into seven haplogroups.

Like other reviewers, I thought he departed from scientific findings to fanciful interpretation in "describing" each of the seven lines of mtDNA he traced in modern populations.  It's still a compelling read for those interested in DNA research and application.

Quotes:

p. 28 - Like more familiar instruction  systems such as language, number or computer binary code what matters is not so much the symbols themselves bu the order in which they appear."

Question: what other simple instructions systems are there?

p. 71 - using mtDNA to disprove descendants of Russian czar

p. 126 - Neanderthals are not our ancestors

p. 128 - explanation of mules and why Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal may have split



Published: 2001  Read: June 2015  Genre: Science

Moby-Duck - Donovan Hohn

In January 1992 a container ship rocked in a violent storm in the sub-Arctic ocean and dumped 12 containers the size of 18 wheeler semi-trucks into the ocean.  At least one burst open and spilled thousands of yellow plastic ducks, intended for children's bath toys.  The author, intrigued by the story, set out to find out where the ducks ended up.  His journey and education on the ocean, shipping, and the people who study it is the story of this book.

It's a strange mixture of hard science, quirky character portrayals and a personal odyssey, introduced in each chapter with quotes from Moby Dick, Thoreau's writings and environmentalists.  I learned about the Pacific Garbage Patch, which isn't a huge concentrated dead zone of debris but an area of the Pacific where the currents swirl and idle, where plastics that make there way to the ocean may linger.
I learned to how complex the oceans are, more like a liquid atmosphere with its own climates and storms raging below the surface.  I learned about "The Tragedy of the Commons", a concept that "in a finite world of diminishing resources...the freedom of individuals will not lead hopefully to progress but fatalistically to destruction".  The environment, shared by all, will be exhausted by the rational pursuit of individual prosperity.  Only a decline in population or consumption can avert it.

The author shares detailed facts and his novice experiences while traveling with oceanographers, environmental clean up crews and commercial ship captains and becomes dabbles philosophically in the impact of the spill and its meaning in our world.  He reveals too an adventurous recklessness that takes him from his family for weeks at a time from shortly before his son's birth, making him seem sometimes as irresponsible as the polluters he's investigating.  In all a different read.


published:  2011  Genre: Non-fiction
ISBN: 780143120506

On the Grid - Scott Huler

Subtitle - A plot of land, an average neighborhood, and the systems that make our world work

I like quirky books.  I especially like finding out how things work or evolved or came to be.  I read an earlier title by this author [click here] and looked for his latest one.

The book traces the development and functioning of public works that we couldn't live without but hardly give any thought - land management, water, electric, gas, sewer, and more.  The author sets out from his own home in Raleigh, North Carolina, to discover how all these services came to be and how the provide for his family.  I've had an article in my "do some day" pile of stuff that describes how to trace where your water comes from.  Living in Arizona, I thought that would be a worthwhile effort but I've never gotten to it.  Huler gets it done and more.

He sings the praises of engineers and all those who work behind the scenes to keep these services running.  Makes me wish I'd studied some engineering (I could never of hacked the math!).  I recommend it for an enlightening read.

(Library book)

Published: 2010  Read: June 2012   Genre: Non-fiction

The Hiding Place - Corrie ten Boom

I've been exploring the act of forgiveness and this book was recommended to me on the subject.  It's the story of a Dutch woman and her family who helped rescue Jews during WWII in Holland.  Corrie and her family were eventually arrested and imprisoned and when she was released she embarked on helping those affected by the holocaust - both its victims and its perpetrators.  I am awed that someone could forgive those who harmed them so terribly and inspired.

I marked several passages [Note to book lovers, I don't actually "mark" books - I use little sticky tapes that I can remove after I've read the book]:

p. 33 ..our wise Father in heaven knows when we're going to need things.  Don't run out ahead of Him.  When the time comes that some of us will have to die, you will look into your heart and find the strength you need--just in time.

p. 37  Happiness isn't something that depends on our surroundings.  It's something we make inside ourselves.

p. 48 Do you know what hurts so very much?  It's love. Love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain.  There are two things we can do when this happens.  We can kill the love so that it stops hurting.  But then, of course, part of us dies too.  Or, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel.

p. 209  The real sin lay in thinking that any power to help and transform came from me.

p. 231 And so I discovered that is it not on our forgiveness any more then on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His.  When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself.

At the conclusion of the book she shares her dying sister's wish,  "Tell people what we have learned here [in the concentration camp]..that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still!"

In all, a thought-provoking read that I would recommend.  I got in from the library so no half.com link.

Published: 1971    Read: March 2012     Genre: Non-fiction

Defining the Wind - Scott Huler

Sub-title: The Beaufort Scale, and how a 19th-century admiral turned science into poetry


What a gem this book is!  I love the genre I think of as "history bites".  They are books that illuminate an obscure bit of history and tell a story of a key discovery or invention.  


In this work of non-fiction, Scott Huler, an NPR regular, tells how Francis Beaufort's name came to be attached to the scale describing the power of the wind.  He describes the scale as "110 words of poetry" and I came to appreciate his viewpoint.  Such a simple looking list giving so much information in such a concise manner.  It speaks to writing clearly for the layman, being precise, organization and consistency.  Beaufort kept track of the wind in notebooks for most of his life and they are still able to be viewed.


The book also describes the men at the end of the 18th century as science and technology emerged and defines the difference between the two as science being systematic knowledge about the real world vs technology which are things we create to solve problems or to do work  (p.91). Language then is one of the first and oldest technologies. 


The author spent many years researching the history of the scale because of his admiration for its writing and its writer to find out who they were and how they came to create the scale.


Links this book led me to:
The BBC Shipping Forecast that uses the scale in their daily broadcast

Published: 2004 Read: 1/2012