Book Review

Be Like the Fox: Machiavelli In His World by Erica Benner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"...instead of praying for some new holy man to save you, learn the way to Hell in order to steer clear of it yourself." - Niccolo Machiavelli

I became aware of, and interested in, this book when I came across this interview with its author: https://www.vox.com/2017/7/24/1591382....

Erica Benner asserts in the interview and in the book that Machiavelli was not Machiavellian. Though his oft quoted Prince is How-to-Be-a-Tyrant, he wrote it ironically. Knowing that tyrants always eventually implode, he set out to encourage the current one to implode fasterc so better men could set about establishing a more stable republic.

Ms. Benner has written a sweeping, all encompassing, biography that engaged me like a well written novel. This book deserves to stand with Barbara Tuchman's The Distant Mirror and The Guns of August as important histories that illuminate our present.

Starting in Florence when it was its own republic the book expands to include the Medici, several Popes, the King of France, and the Hapsburg Emperor, all of whom Machiavelli interacted personally with as diplomat for the city he loved and devoted his life to. When he wasn't able to work directly for its welfare he studied the histories of Rome and Greece to learn when states flourished and when they faltered. This scholarship he put into a history of Florence that was a cautionary tale to current and future leaders. When he couldn't get people's attention with history he wrote comedies poking fun at himself, his city, and its leaders.

I love this book. Highly recommended.



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Book Review

Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“...it’s better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

Read Breakfast at Tiffany's. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. It's a short novel(I LOVE short novels) that you could read in a night; a few hours if you're fast. But don't. Like most great writing it's tempting to gobble it up like so much hot fudge sundae. But force yourself to slow down. Digest it slowly, savoring every bite. Read Holly Golightly as Audrey Hepburn spoke with her pauses and stresses.

Holly Golightly is a woman-child with earth-mother people skills and handwriting that's a childish scrawl. She's gone through hell and come out a pure soul who can only be herself. She's totally present in the moment and doesn't hold a grudge. She appreciates all of people, focuses on the good and isn't offended by the flaws.

A friend recommended reading Truman Capote, but I didn't think I was up to In Cold Blood. And it's brilliant. The writing is complete, not sparse like Hemingway. But there's no excess back story that should've been left in the author's notes. The story is a character driven snapshot of these people's lives. Through the author's eyes you fall in love with Holly and through Holly's eyes you love all of the souls who swirl around her. It's not tied up neatly with a bow like the movie, but that's the brilliance of books; they don't have to be. This book isn't more complex as much as it's more colorful. And more satisfying.




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Book Review

Awakenings by Oliver Sacks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As World War I drew to a close, besides the great Spanish Flu epidemic there was also an epidemic of a 'sleepy sickness' or encephalitis lethargica in which patients would be unable to stay awake and would sleep for days, weeks, or even months. Often they would seem to recover fully and live full lives for a decade or more only to be struct with a kind of Parkinsonism. They would spend the remaining decades of their lives rigid, catatonic, or a variety of other symptoms that prevented them from interacting normally with their environment. Unable to be cared for by family or even most institutions they ended up in long-term chronic hospitals.

In 1966 Dr. Oliver Sacks joined of Mount Carmel Hospital in New York where over 80 such patients were housed and having their basic needs seen to. Instead of dismissing them or avoiding them Dr. Sacks took an interest in his patients, saw their humanity through their disabilities, and set about doing what he could for them. A new drug, L-DOPA, had possibilities to relieve the Parkinson symptoms. "Awakenings" chronicles the history of the epidemic, Dr. Sacks' and his patients' experience with L-DOPA, and what they learned from their experience.

"Awakenings" is a good example of what Maria Popova calls "the everythingness of everything" of Oliver Sacks. He saw his patients as complete people, not the sum of their symptoms. He chronicles how everything affects their responses to their disease: the hospital environment of space, light and air, hospital policies, family relationships, the emotional investment the staff made in the patients, and the patients' own curiosity and humor towards themselves and their lives. He discusses many theories of people and events, not just medical theories but also physics and the catastrophic threshold of chaos theory.

My take away from the book, besides wishing very much to have a doctor like him who listens and observes and is interested in everything affecting my life, is how everything has a direct effect on peoples' lives; space, light, air, love, respect, support. And how our tendency to want to compartmentalize people's lives and expect exemplary behavior under horrible circumstances has no basis in reality.

Highly recommended



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Quote: Rumi

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
—Rumi

Quote: James Baldwin

"(An artist's) role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are."

Quote: James Baldwin

Book Review: 11/22/63

11/22/63 by Stephen King

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


While I'm really glad I read it, I didn't always enjoy the reading of it. To me, it's over written. Every thing and every action is completely described leaving nothing to the imagination of the reader. The first few chapters especially needed to be run through the editing process a couple more times. I much prefer authors who know how to provide all necessary details while leaving enough out for the reader to be fully intellectually engaged. Not every question needs to be answered.

The second thing not completely engaging about this book is the main character. I never sympathized or identified with him in any meaningful way. But there is something of a literary tradition of uninteresting main characters. Dickens' David Copperfield, who's interesting as a child but boring as an adult, is my favorite example. And like David Copperfield, Stephen King's other characters are all interesting, three-dimensional people readers will have no problem identifying with and caring about.

The other thing Stephen King has done incredibly well is research the events leading up to and after the main event. The movements, history, and people around Lee Harvey Oswald are all brought to vivid life and is, alone, worth reading the book. This book also brings the era, 1958 - 1963, to life in incredible detail putting the reader into the middle of American culture; food, music, clothes, cars, the easy hospitality and respect, the clean air, the quiet nights, the mills belching toxins into the air 24/7, the restrooms marked Ladies, Gentlemen, and Colored with an arrow pointing around back to a board with a hole in it over a ditch. Except for that one mention everything else in the book involves white people.

Spoiler alert: While the ending generally rings true, the changes after Kennedy is saved seem extreme; world wide earthquakes? the rending of space/time? the collapse of the universe? I found all that hard to buy.



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Book Review

The Velvet Rage: Overcoming the Pain of Growing Up Gay in a Straight Man's World by Alan Downs

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


“What was once a feeling has become something deeper and more sinister in our psyches—it is a deeply and rigidly held belief in our own unworthiness for love. We were taught by the experience of shame during those tender and formative years of adolescence that there was something about us that was flawed, in essence unlovable, and that we must go about the business of making ourselves lovable if we are to survive.”

I had thought I had my internalized homophobia well in hand. Being gay has long been the one part of my life that I'm most comfortable with, most secure in, and most willing to protect and demand respect of. I've long been aware of internalized homophobia, have examined my own, and kept a watchful eye out for the tiny ways it surfaces throughout my life. But still that line from the Friends theme song; "your job's a joke, you're broke, your love life's DOA" is totally me. I had never associated those gaps with internalized homophobia. But in The Velvet Rage Alan Downs connects those dots in a direct line. He shows how the early message of "be this, not that" and the absence of a mentor or a sympathetic ear gets into our DNA and travels with us into adulthood, prompting us to foreclose on fulfillment in many areas of our life and not just in our sexual expression.

Based on a lifetime working with his own therapy clients, this is an amazing important book that remains imminently readable despite the complex ideas discussed. Best of all he includes a list of skills, actions we can take in order to move towards a more fulfilling life and he emphasizes that moving from shame to acceptance is a skill, a practice, something you do rather than something you think about.

Highly recommended, possibly required reading for all gay men.



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Book Review

On the Move: A Life by Oliver Sacks

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Dear Oliver Sacks, or I should say, Dr. Sacks: Thank you so much for the gift of your book. It will forever remain one of my most treasured. Your love and joy and gratitude and curiosity infuse every part of it. I don't know how you do it because on the surface your writing is very straightforward, observational, but somehow that transparency allows all of your wonderful warmth to come through. Reading your book is such a pleasure that I did it in little segments, stretching it out so that I wouldn't finish it too soon. And at the end I had a true sense of a full, complete life; a life that left the world a better place.

My regret at finishing your book is tempered by the knowledge of the dozen other books that you wrote and the further chance to live in your world where life and people are endlessly fascinating. I can't decide whether to jump back to the beginning of this book and read it cover to cover again or start right in on Awakenings or make myself read something completely different in order to come back to you afresh. A hardcover edition of Awakenings is proving difficult to obtain, but luckily it's easily available as an ebook.

I'm sorry I didn't get to meet you in person. I have quite a crush on you. I would've loved to hear some of your stories, although I have little to offer you other than my attention.

Yours truly,

Tim Dominic



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The Meaning of It All

“The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.” - Alan Watts

As found on Brain Pickings

What a Calling is Not

FEAR

Do Not Despise Your Inner World

"Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals.

What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others. - Martha Nussbaum"

https://www.brainpickings.org/2012/10/12/martha-nussbaum-take-my-advice/

Copley Symphony Hall

I Sing the Body Electric

Martha Graham

It's Not Where You Start

“It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish,

  Nobody starts a winner, give me a slow beginner,”

   - Song by Barbara Cook, Songwriters Dorothy Fields/Arthur Schwartz

What You Fear to Lose

The Different Pawed

 In this world of the simple and odd,

The bent and the plain, 

the unbalanced bod,

The imperfect people and differently pawed, 

some live without love... 

That's how they're flawed.

 - Berkeley Breathed

Taste All Wines

“You can only know a good wine if you have first tasted a bad one.”

― Paulo Coelho