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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Review: Don Quixote

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Initially funny - ultimately terribly tedious. I did not like this book and want to apologize to my first three kids, because I made them read it in high school, as I was under the false impression that it was one of those "very important books".

The only important message I could extract from the 900 pages is that if you read too many nonsense books, it might deal a serious blow to your sanity, which is what happened to Don Quixote of La Mancha.

It is a clever book, yes. I laughed at Quixote's idiocy, but I found my own limit for whimsical stupidity at around page 300. Sympathy for his straight man, Sancho, and fatigue over the Dulcinea delusion had me just scanning some of the following 600 pages and sometimes just reading the first sentence of each paragraph.

Apologies to all sweet on Cervantes. This book was not for me.

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Review: Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked

Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On any given night of the week, say around 8 pm, do you find that you, your spouse, and all of your kids have their eyes glued to a screen of some kind? Does it bother you? Does it worry you? Read on.

In Irresistible , Adam Alter explains why we have become slaves to our devices by first explaining addiction, generally, and then by explaining technology addiction, specifically.
This alone is scary stuff. It gets more intense, though. I’m sure you’ve come across at least one article on how technology is actually changing our brains, right? Like me, you probably had a moment of extreme uneasiness -- just before clicking over to the next article.

In this book, after clearly defining behavioral addiction, Mr. Alter points out that behavioral scientists now have enough data to do valuable analyses of the effects of internet use on humans. He then closely examines how we get hooked, why we get hooked, and how our lives are impacted negatively; from obesity and diseases of sedentary-living to digital amnesia and a shrinking capacity for remembering. Although the author does devote a chapter to “what you can do to fight it”, when I put this book down, I was left feeling worse than when I read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

As with the last book I read on the topic of unwise and excessive internet use, this book began with examples of industry giants (Steve Jobs and a half dozen other “recognizables”) who would not under any circumstances allow their kids iPads or allow them to use the apps and games they develop. Steve Jobs was quoted specifically (soon after introducing the iPad as something that every person should own and use) as stating that his kids will never use one. It is hard to get past that, it really is. It is like discovering that the landfill in your backyard grew from the waste of Silicon Valley multi-millionaires who live hundreds of miles away.

I made myself read this book because I knew it would spur me on to action, even though I could not imagine what that action would be. Figuring out how to de-internet my life when every aspect of my existence is plugged into it? Seriously, I don’t have time for this. Then, I returned to page 242 which describes how in one study, thousands of US and European adults struggled to recall their own kids’ cell phone numbers, and, in fact, found it hard to remember any string of numbers. Does anyone other than me remember when we stored (in our minds) the phone numbers of countless friends and family members? Could you do that now? One study revealed how our ability to reach into the chambers of our own minds to retrieve information which is there has been compromised and changed by our choice to just Google it. For example: “I know the capital of Iowa. Give me a minute, I’m gonna remember this. Oh, never mind, I’ll ask Siri.” A few years of this behavior, and those chambers grow darker and darker.

While I don’t think I have time for this, I also know I can’t afford to do nothing. I don’t like the fact that when the power in my house fails during a thunder storm, no one knows what to do with themselves. (What did we use to do, back when we were humans?) I don’t like so much sitting at the end of the day. I want to do more and click less. I am not 21, but I am also not finished becoming who/what I want to be - living like an appendage to my device is not what I want to be.

I hope you choose to read this book. All unplugging suggestions warmly welcomed!

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Review: The Learning Habit: A Groundbreaking Approach to Homework and Parenting that Helps Our Children Succeed in School and Life

The Learning Habit: A Groundbreaking Approach to Homework and Parenting that Helps Our Children Succeed in School and Life by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the first of three books I have read this summer on how we (adults and kids) learn, and how the internet is profoundly changing our ability to learn....really learn, that is.

The content in these books quakes my soul and has been so disruptive that I’ve been unable to write about it. At last I am here, fingers poised over the keyboard, finally ready to distill the content, one book at a time.

This is a review of The Learning Habit. With plans to read two other books on this general topic, I eased in with this one first. I had read it three years ago. It scared me, so I tucked it away. Hmmm. But, as my concerns about digital communication and its impact on our ability to think deeply and to focus have continued to grow, I pulled this book back out and sat and read. Again.

Written in 2013, The Learning Habit is a book reporting on the results of the largest study on the digital lives and routines of American children and their families of its kind. The Learning Habit examines how children spend their time online and it looks for connections to performance in school and levels of social anxiety in children. It should scare any conscious parent.

This quote from a very successful game developer will cue you in on one of the central themes of this book: The goal of developers is to make the most complex, most captivating, most addictive games they can. I don’t let my children play video games for precisely that reason. I don’t want my kids spending time gaming, when they could be playing a sport or reading a book.”

Among many other disturbing facts, The Learning Habit Study, which is filled with multiple charts (I love charts!) and with great research, found that children who game more than 90 minutes a day are twice as likely to have social problems. The book demonstrates how social media is many things but that increasing true socialization among kids and teens is NOT one of them. It demonstrates how kids are increasingly able to waste up to 10 hours per day online using iPhones and computers and internet-enabled tablets, doing very little productive work, but are not able to sit still and read a book for 10 minutes. There is a connection.

If your children are young, please read this book. It is probably a book more geared toward parents of young children/elementary school-aged children. It is filled with great advice for parents; it does not merely excoriate electronic entertainment. It contains step-by-step guidelines for how to set limits, how to make sure the time your child spends online is productive, and how to partner with them in their lives online, before it is too late. It is filled with case studies, time management techniques, focus checklists, and helpful homework approaches.

Read it. This is a book that truly matters.


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