Reviews and Comments

Preface: Don't read the views for this book.

Observations:

0. It's been almost exactly one year since the election. I was not prepared for how fresh the wounds still are while reliving the whole ordeal, nor for how emotional and drained I was by the end.

1. She's at least ten times the person I am. I'm not sure whether I have any hope or compassion left in me as far as our government and our democracy is concerned. But she seems to have it in droves despite possibly being the most openly vilified and wrongfully treated public figure in America.

2. This book is positively dripping with allusions and references to books. Novels, political works, poems, scripture. I don't know how she has time for it, but it's obvious she constantly seeks information and understanding and experiences outside her own, to understand history and policy, and to grow in compassion. This is obviously in stark contrast to Donald Trump, who may or may not be actually illiterate, but who definitely appears to not think that other people are real or have feelings, or that consciousness exists anywhere but inside his own head.

3. Roughly the first third of the book is about her personal life and how much she loves her family, and is really quite sweet. Any one-star review that says this book is nothing but lies and excuses should be dismissed outright as, if not a lie, then as unfair and incomplete.

Picked it up on impulse. Tiny little thing, more of a pamphlet than a book, comprising three essays he wrote as he was dying.

What I want to remember

+ The idea of a "periodic life" is neat: collecting an element, its periodic number equalling the collector's age, each year. Sometimes it's a small nugget of gold and sometimes it's a radioactive element in a lead container.

+ Sachs being happy, fit, active and spry into his 80s. Ceasing to care much about political or tedious things. "I'm closer to being a century old than anything else.." is a dose of perspective.

+ His phrasing when writing about wanting to have lived a "good and useful life" lines up nearly perfectly with the portion I'm currently reading of Mastering the Core Teachings the Buddha wherein it written that the point of living in the world and training in morality is to live a good and useful life. It's not necessarily Buddhist or even interesting to want to live a "good and useful life" but I wonder what he would have said if prompted to elaborate on how and why he wanted to do so.

Oops, I didn't mean to read this. I thought it was Tribes, by Godin. So instead of getting a book on leadership, I got a pop-psyche/anthropology book on how we're lonely, isolated creatures, longing for a sense of tribal belonging. It's dominant focus is on how the lack of a meaningful community for war veterans to return to is generating unprecedented numbers of people with PTSD or other trauma related deficits, contrasted with Native American communities who have a very close, communal, tribal society which incorporates war, and which integrates war veterans better.

It was fine. There were a couple interesting tidbits. I've read several "modern society is morally bankrupt and the agricultural revolution ruined everything for us all" books now, so this wasn't especially revelatory or interesting. But it was super short.

His brief discourse on gender roles and trauma really drew focus to the fact that a good 95% of the book seemed to about men to the exclusion of anybody else.