Homegoing reminds me a lot of a blend of two novels: Americannah and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. I was reminded of Americannah because I was eduated about African history from an African perspective. In particular, Gyasi tells the bitter truth that the Original Sin of Africa was tribes raiding each other to sell the conquered off as slaves to the British. In the story Asante and Fante warriors are played against each other first for profit and then for subjugation by the English crown.

At the personal dimension this interplay leads to one line of relatives collaborating and then being subjugated; the other familial line are sold into American bondage, ferried by ships full of Death to America. This line follows much of the detail of The Underground Railroad but focuses on sharecropping and what life after Reconstruction’s abortion looked like. This line leads from the South through the Great Migration to the Ivy League.

And here the stories rejoin: the severed halves rejoin, ignorant of their role in each others’ lives, but fully aware of the preciousness of Africa.

The plot moves interestingly between one family line’s next-generation to the other family line’s next-generation starting from an original primordial mother. The pacing is fast and, like Adichie, the craft of sentences is better than the actual plot. I’ve included my highlit notes after the jump.

I don’t know which Sally Field it is people encounter these days. The loving matriarch of Mrs. Doubtfire, Forrest Gump, or Punchline? Or is it the inanity of Gidget and The Flying Nun? Or is it the feminist icons built on stunning acting chops like Norma Rae or Sibyl? For me, I was in that space between these extremes: “Gidget” in syndication during the summer and (holy cow!) “Sibyl” in a high school psychology class (even as her character idly flopped about in Mrs. Doubtfire lacking any intelligible motivation). I decided to listen to this memoir to hear what her life was like.

It was much more than I expected (but aren’t all lives?), much heavier, much graver, and much more vulnerable. Ms. Field, at this time in her life, is putting her whole self out there for us to see and is bravely pointing to every wound, every vulnerability, and every complex truth she can find. It’s so strong, so tragic, and so powerful that I don’t know of many other tales like it.

Owing to her supreme talent as a performer, the audio narration is outstanding. Her ear for script-writing means that we have a memoir defined by certain acting beats. She knows when she’s acting as her own voice-over, when she should externalize a thought process, and how to create a question in the listener that heightens tension toward a thematic resolution.

Behind the narrative of this actor’s transformation from an adorable Pasadena girl-next-door to someone who could go toe-to-toe with anyone in the Actor’s Studio is a stunningly vulnerable, vivid recounting of how a broken childhood haunts permanently and hurts until you face it.

Coming off of facing and conquering some “high modern literture” in the last few months, I thought I’d tackle one final member of the cheered authors of the early aughts, Jennifer Egan. For the last several months her name and this book’s cover hung out over Symphony Space around the corner, needling me to read the book. Additionally, her previous novel A Visit from the Good Squad scored a Pulitzer, so I was expecting a strong showing. I, however, was not impressed.

Introduction

Many of my best experiences being a son were with my Dad while we were driving somewhere on the weekend. It was during those times that my Dad’s mind would wander and he’d talk to me about whatever was on his mind (cars, school, and, uhm, sex) and I’d ask about whatever was on mine (what’s the stock market, why atomic bombs, and, uhm, sex). On one of those trips, I asked my dad where beer came from and ultimately why people made it. I remember the answer had something to do with barrels, rain, and this fundamental truth:

They caught a buzz and humans like getting buzzes.

Wow, that pretty much nailed a critical aspect of human nature for me.

At the time, I didn’t even know what a buzz was or what the metaphor “to catch one” meant, but Dad’s summation wasn’t far off. Fundamentally, we are Great Apes who like catching buzzes. An occasional flirtation with zymurgy, kefir, and kombucha confirmed Dad’s just-so tale: early alcohol was surely caused by natural yeasts in barrels mixed with rain consuming sugar to make alcohol in a time far lost to memory. It was an honest and surprisingly adult answer to give a young lad.

But I had no such space to ask about humans’ love of other drugs and thusly never did. It didn’t feel safe, this was the era of MADD, “Just Say No” and DARE.

ASIDE: Parents of now I’d warn you to be careful about which programs you let your children internalize. If they’ve been conditioned to proscribe curiosity, that means they’re not asking you. And if their curiosity isn’t being addressed by you, it’s likely being catered to by someone else who’s likely selling them something (looking at you, Pornhub) — possibly something that distorts a healthy but uncomfortable truth..

Many decades later, with cannabis now recreationally available in several states in the union, alcohol sales remaining strong, caffeine ubiquitous, and nicotine experiencing a renaissance in e-cigarettes, we’re seemingly coming to better grips (and therefore better policies) that are built on the fundamental truth my Dad shared: human love to get high.

The only questions remaining is which substances will be legally permitted and which will not? And how will be punish those who choose to fulfill this love or sell the means to fulfill it? Having long been an advocate for cannabis decriminalization myself, I thought I’d dig into these questions with Michael Pollan, the square of squares who wrote the Omnivore’s Dilemma. With the same journalistic style with which he exposed the problems of industrial scale food production, I figured Pollan could deliver a measured evaluation of the science, the value, and the undeserved demonization of psychedelics.

More about Pollan’s experience with psychedelics after the jump

At work we formed a book club and Americannah was the first book we read.

The story was pretty conventional: Ifemelu, a Nigerian girl, grows up lower-middle class but upwardly aspiring in Nigeria with her family and friends including the handsome Obinze. Eventually she moves to the American East Coast and lives, camouflaged, within the American-Black experience. She lives as an exotic trophy of a white boyfriend, the insufficiently politically-active girlfriend to a somewhat narcissistic Yale intellectual during the Obama ascendancy, and ultimately as a single woman bound back to Nigeria to pursue a lost connection.

In parallel, her friend, Obinze, enters England illegally and works to evade immigration nets. His experience doesn’t seem to provide the same level of growth and kindness for it’s bound up in desperation. He scrabbles hard and tries to find a foothold in the soggy shores of England but fails. Ultimately Obinze is deported back to Nigeria where he must make a go at success on different terms.

While the plot was sufficient to carry the characters forward, I didn’t find that its internal structure was used in any novel way. The experiences were rather pedestrian and uninspired and felt like set-dressing where Adichie’s beautiful sentences could fall like gilded feathers onto set stages. Many times I didn’t care about the plot details but was attentively reading so that I could find the next immaculately-constructed one-liner from her pen. To wit:

• “How easy it was to lie to strangers, to create with strangers the versions of our lives that we have imagined.”
• Everybody is hungry in this country, even the rich men are hungry, but nobody is honest.
• Why didn’t she just ask ‘Was it the black girl or the white girl?’” Ginika laughed. “Because this is America. You’re supposed to pretend that you don’t notice certain things.”

Check out the notes after the jump for some wonderful quotes if you want a compressed version of the story.

TL;DR: If you’re looking for a summer read on a cross-country flight, I’d strongly recommend this one. I started page one during a long taxi out at SFO and happily read my way back to the beginning of our descent back into JFK. Perfect for a day on a plane or a day sur la plage.

Amor Towles’ Rules of Civility is a more enjoyable, realistic, and masterful imagining of the drama and the times in the gap between the height of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of World War II. Invariably any book that finds its timing in this area has to stand up next to Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. It does this well and in fact shows it to be Gatsby’s better in several principal ways.

More after the break

Here are my notes from my Inspectional Read of Willingham’s book. My upshot take away is this:

• Support learners learning to decode with zeal
• Give them many books that provide familiarity with many, many contexts inch-deep, mile wide
• Promote this as a primary means of acquisition, promote books as a resource, promote ignorance as an excuse to explore books and reading (not asking Siri or Alexa); they must “work through” the knowledge gain to etch the cortical pathways; nothing wrong with memorization of “scaffolding” facts
• Fight teens apathy toward reading by:
  • Having established that we all (mom, dad, you) are readers
  • Making other low-drag pathways (phone, TV, games, etc) higher-drag so that reading is a means for addressing boredom, curiosity, etc. It’s not the devices per se, it’s what the devices consume (time) so effortlessly against higher-payoff experiences

I’ve now read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari twice and I consider it to be a wonderful summation of what my species is, for however long we remain the dominant species on this planet. In this post I present a few take-away ideas, but also provide my notes as well as Kindle highlights in JSON format.

For me, this book is closer to a religious text for a religion of Human-ism; or, better yet, Sapiens-ism. It is a book that frames the whole of what we are as animals and the means by which we’ve fabricated culture. It was once the scope of religion to answer these, but this book covers that in a much more relatable, believable, and comprehensible way. Genetics, biology, and neuroscience here provide me a vastly greater appreciation of what Sapiens is than any mythic text.

In Sapiens, we explore a place where dogma and imagined truths are set aside so that we mortal engines can see ourselves for what we are:

resource-anxious Great Apes with an odd cognitive mutation that fuels our ability to imagine and thereby abstract.

Note: Based on my read of How to Read a Book, I am applying the “Inspectional Reading” technique here so as to extract the majority of relevant points without doing an “Analytical Reading” on this content. I’ll reflect on the efficacy of this method elsewhere. Nevertheless, I believe that this write-up captures many of the major points. Conclusion Pre-Digestion We must make learners’ time investment valuable “Teaching is an act of persuasion” (conversely, many litigators including Justice Ginsburg note the inverse in the courtroom: persuasion is an act of teaching; she uses the story style of Nabokov to ensure that cognitive complexity remains small and persuadability, therefore, remains high.

I found this book a few years ago on the sidewalks of Park Slope and I regret I haven’t read it sooner!

Adler and van Doren provide a wonderful set of techniques for getting a better grip on your “To Read” pile and help you feel more comfortable in choosing what level of attention is appropriate for the material. By making this calculation in an informed and methodical way, you can process your pile more effectively. I really needed this help because I’m such a completionist, I’m always afraid I’m going to lose a critical fact if I’m not diligent to the end degree. I hope these techniques will help me move more quickly and exercise better judgment.

Having provided those techniques, the authors provide a very considerate introduction on how to read books in genres that you might not be comfortable in: science, social science, or philosophy.

Over and above those practical points, the book serves as a good set of advice on how to do anything actively: active listening, active reading, active programming, active conversation, etc. The skills of acting actively, we’d say “mindfully” today, were seen as related to reading and writing when this book came out in 1940, but the truths that underlie that view have not changed. I found many places where “read/write a book” could have been swapped with “read/write code” or “converse” or “learn to play guitar” or “meditate” or “make tender love to” and the value been as impactful.

This book in the right hands at the right time could make for a huge change in educational quality and life quality of the reader.

This is all the “reviewing” I’ll do here. Below I’ll cover the techniques and distillations I made of the text. I’m posting them here for quick reference :).

One of the few books that I’ve ever read twice, and one that I read twice in short order, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles hits me in the sweet spot intersection of my love of classics, adventure, and beautifully-imagined writing. Said the by-no-means-modestly-gifted writer Donna Tartt: “[she] carries the true savagery and chill of antiquity.” Tartt’s is a wonderful summation and compliment to Ms. Miller. This is a beautiful book that captures the voice, and the mind of the ancients so perfectly that I felt like I was back in one of my Latin classes, chipping away at granite-hard sentences to discover the wit, barbarity, and glory of those days gone by.

The book centers on Patroclus, the friend (and lover) of Achilles, greatest of all Greeks. Patroclus sets up for us the life and fears of kingdoms within the Hellenic region. While we moderns see ancient Hellas as the cradle of our civilization, but a few centuries earlier it was a loose association of island warlords spoiling for an excuse to declare war on their neighbors. Patroclus, neither strong nor beautiful, but keenly observant helps us slide into the world of pre-Iliad Hellas. The exposition established Patroclus becomes disinherited and travels to the court of Achilles’ father.

A few months ago I was at my barber’s and while Alex was giving me a trim I managed to catch Alan Alda on some morning show talking about his latest book.

Now to me, Alda will always be Hawkeye. It seems like all the times I turned on the TV in my youth after 9 pm, he was on in an episode of “MASH.” Likable, affable, and sensitive, beneath his ironic detachment, his bleeding heart was bare on the show. Later, I enjoyed watching him on “Scientific American Discovery” as he, it seemed to me, always managed to get the scientists to have fun and to show their passion for their study.

This was, of course, long before I thought I would ever document my love of a science (programming) and share it with the world.

In any case, Alda, in this morning spot, talked about his communication issues and the humility he has had to have with communicating with his wife over their 60 years of marriage! That someone who could offer so much sympathy and pathos in his performances couldn’t communicate emotions effectively was nothing short of gob-smacking. Furthermore, Alda points out that our inability to communicate science well has lead to the baffling counter-science movements of anti-vaccination and flat-Eartherism (for reals?). Based on that, I decided to take a look at this book in hopes that it might help me become a better partner, manager, and friend.