Review: The Other Einstein

The Other Einstein by Marie Benedict
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book was a gift from a friend. I loved it.

Frankly, other than the many posters I've seen, with affirmations plastered boldly beneath his disheveled visage, I don't know much about the man - Albert Einstein. This book is not and does not profess to be a biography of his life with his first wife. The author explains at the end that there are facts that she was able to unearth before she wrote this story and there are embellishments of these facts which she was able to imagine and include in the story.

Of course, I now have the fabrications forever fitted into the mix of Mileva Maric's life with Albert!

I do love books about strong women (not the type which make the news these days as they bear no resemblance to the real thing). I mean women who clawed and fought for education, for a life of the mind, for recognition of their exceptionalism and respect for their achievements in the science and literary worlds, in the face of a brutal, and deep-rooted irrelevance there. Mileva was such a woman, it seems.

The language at the beginning of the book is a little beige - maybe even vanilla. However, as the pace increases, color and flavor do, too. Keep reading as this book gets better and better with each page.


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Review: Vilette

Vilette by Charlotte Brontë
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was an ambitious read but never, ever unpleasant. Reading Bronte, to me, is like listening to your favorite piece of music or walking through a boundless, beautiful garden. You can, in fact, begin anywhere and feel nourished by the beauty and art in every breath of it. You can take it in gulps or you can sip slowly and casually. In Vilette, there is a story being told, of course, but Bronte is never in a hurry. She causes the reader to slow down and be in the moment with her. I think she knows that her sentence craft and strolling thoughts (regardless of what she is describing or conveying) are so impeccable that haste would border on the felonious.

We are told by history that Vilette is autobiographical. Her life, it appears, was plagued by loneliness, financial strain, and want of opportunity. Yet, her talent and depth of character poured out in her writing. She is an individual who focused on her eulogy virtues far more than her resume virtues, practically a foreign concept these days. She is a person I would have liked to have known.

I waited until I finished the book before reading what others had to say about it. I was so disgruntled by the ending of book, that I only read essays on why she closed her story the way she did. In these essays, I did find satisfaction.

This is not a quick read, a clamorous page-turner, or a gripping adventure story with hairpin twists and turns. It is a deeply personal and interesting story told with elegance and adorned with dazzlingly intelligent revelations on human nature.


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Review: Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I thought the author did a good job spinning the yarn in this work, because it was a book I wanted to keep reading. This is because the writing was very good (so many sentences which sparkled for me) but also because I was determined to figure out what it was actually about. It was disjointed; it ended up being something akin to a patchwork quilt. There were several superb vignettes any one of which could have become the thread which held it all together, yet each character and each scene felt incomplete. The story spans Depression Era and WWII - hard times all around. There are several conflicts which seek resolution - too many, in my opinion. All of this I was willing to forgive, because I was grateful for those shimmering sentences. But the ending? Gah. I really wanted something different.

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Review: Breaking the Feedback Loop

Breaking the Feedback Loop by A.N. Turner
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was written by a University of Pennsylvania student in his junior year of college. It might be the most important book you will read on the difficulties which face us as a society as we hurl headlong into a life lashed tightly to the internet.

If you have not stopped to thoughtfully consider how your life has been reshaped and leashed to devices and how this is changing who you are at your very core, do it now. Start with this book. I warn you, though. It is disruptive.

Strangely, we will eagerly read about the problems of the past and are often entertained as we read about the potential of the future. However, we are less inclined to critically examine the culture in which we bath ourselves today, right now. I think this is because there is nothing we can do about what has passed or about what has yet to occur. But, we can do something right this minute. We can take some corrective action right now. Inconvenient, right? (I know…)

The author does give many suggestions on how to chip away at our reliance on devices. These suggestions are very doable – setting time limits for checking social media, putting computers and smart phones away in a drawer for X number of hours (or minutes) per day, building slowly toward more independence from them.

I read an article recently which described a looming crisis in our military. https://wjla.com/news/nation-world/wh...

According to the Pentagon, “71 percent of Americans ages 17 to 24, the military's main recruitment source, are ineligible to serve.” That's 24 million of the 34 million people in that age group! Why? To put it bluntly, it is because they are too fat, too dumb or too criminal. Can you guess what the culprit is?

In The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald writes: “The loneliest moment in someone’s life is when they are watching their whole world fall apart, and all they can do is stare blankly.” This is us. Staring blankly throughout the day and night at our glowing screens, clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking.

The author spends lots of time discussing the devastating effect of internet porn, as he was once addicted himself. More than 30% of the data that travels over the internet every day is porn and that number is growing at a terrifying rate. Predictions are that in a short time, most internet traffic will be porn. It is already the most profitable. Why is this terrifying? As the book discusses in detail, because it cripples – it cripples emotionally, physically, and cognitively. It’s cheap, easy, and everywhere. It is a drug which alters body chemistry. When it is not there, it is craved; when it is obtained, it never, ever fully satisfies. The average age at first exposure to porn is 10. Porn addiction ruins marriages, it ruins the individual’s ability to form normal relationships, and it derails the lives of the boys and youth addicted to it. Consider a young, still-forming brain steeped for hours a day in impersonal, dehumanizing images. Imagine the many ways this will distort and disable for years to come – maybe forever. If your kids have smart phones, they are exposed. Maybe they are even in this fight.

After reading this book, and a few others like it, I knew I could not go back and pretend that spending hours a day online is o.k. It is reducing IQ, it’s sedentary cloak threatens health in multiple ways, and, very possibly, it is delivering the paralyzing poison of porn to every room it enters.

Books like this make us uncomfortable. It made me uncomfortable. Yet, doing nothing is not an option.

Wanting to end on an up-note, I place a short reading here. It motivated me to take some action against the Jekyll/Hyde monster I must live with – the internet. I hope it helps you too.

" It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. " *
 *Man in the Arena, Theodore Roosevelt

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