Reviews of the books I've read

Okay, when J. K. Rowling writes, she uses a lot of words. This has been happening since book four of the Harry Potter series, and it carried over into this series.

Except, in this book, I didn't feel like it had too many words. So either I've become used to too-many-words, or Rowling's editor managed to convince her to trim the excess with this book.

I enjoyed this book. It isn't a short book, taking most people 11 hours to read, it took me a couple hours less, but that's still a lot of words.

The book starts off pretty much where the last one ended, Robin's wedding, and does a number of flashbacks and fast-forwards to tell the story of that day, week, month. The first part had a number of miscommunications and interfering people and George Costanza awkwardness that I almost stopped reading it. I kept going, and enjoyed the book.

There are a couple mysteries in the book, with the bulk following an unhinged Billy as he deals with memories of childhood violence that may or may not have happened, and a separate investigation of the blackmailing of a government official. I will admit to having spent most of the book trying to figure out what would have been legal six years before, and is no longer legal, and why that would be blackmailable. I suspect this was part of the delight of the mystery.

The Cormoran / Ellacott partnership works well professionally, but both of them long for the other in the book, which leads to a stressed professional relationship. I guess this makes for good tension in a mystery book? Maybe?

Anyway, if you're reading the series, keep going. If you haven't started, start at the first one and make it through the second one. These last two have been fun. Not Harry Potter books 1-3 fun, but adult action-mystery fun.

Matthew had sought to deny her the thing that might save her, the thing for which she had cried in the small hours of the night when everybody else was asleep: the restoration of her self-respect, of the job that had meant everything to her, of the friendship she had not known was one of the prizes of her life until it was torn away from her.

Matthew had lied and kept lying. He had smiled and laughed as she dragged herself through the days before the wedding trying to pretend that she was happy that she had lost a life she had loved. Had she fooled him? Did he believe that she was truly glad her life with Strike was over? If he did, she had married a man who did not know her at all, and if he didn’t…
Location 323

“You don’t get to make those decisions for me!” she yelled.
Location 389

“You see,” Robin had continued with the speech she had prepared, “my life is pretty much wall to wall with people who think they know what’s best for me.”

“Well, yes,” said the therapist, in a manner that Robin felt would have been considered condescending beyond the clinic walls, “we’ve discussed — ”

“ — and…” Robin was by nature conciliatory and polite. On the other hand, she had been urged repeatedly by the therapist to speak the unvarnished truth in this dingy little room with the spider plant in its dull green pot and the man-sized tissues on the low pine table. “… and to be honest,” she said, “you feel like just another one of them.”
Location 743

“We can’t throw it all away, can we?” he had asked her hoarsely from the bed where the doctor had insisted he stay. “All these years?”
Location 860

His personality filled the room like the first bar of a hit song. Strike knew him from those few words as the kind of man who, in the army, was either outstandingly useful or an insubordinate bastard.
Location 1069

“No,” lied Strike, because he knew what it felt like to have your personal details strewn across the newspapers. It was kindest, if at all credible, to pretend you hadn’t read it all, politest to let people tell their own story.
Location 1663

“De mortuis nil nisi bonum?” asked Strike.
Location 1786

He had wanted to believe her when she had told him how glorious it was to have her flat to herself and her freedom restored, yet lately he had felt tiny spots of displeasure when he had told her he had to work weekends, like the first heavy drops of rain that presage a storm.
Location 1840

There was, after all, little pleasure to compare with that given by a woman who really wanted you, he thought
Location 1853

From a distance of two years, he saw himself trying to hold tight to some part of his past as everything else slipped away.
Location 1862

Strike had learned many tricks and secrets, become adept ferreting in even the darkest corners of the internet, but often the most innocent social media sites held untold wealth, a minor amount of cross-referencing all that was necessary to compile detailed private histories that their careless owners had never meant to share with the world.
Location 1886

In Strike’s experience, those who disdained the use of representation in court were either unbalanced or so arrogant that it came to the same thing.
Location 1919

Robin had dwelled at length on her need to discern where the real Matthew ended and her illusions about him began. “People change in ten years,” the therapist had responded. “Why does it have to be a question of you being mistaken in Matthew? Perhaps it’s simply that you’ve both changed?”
Location 2561

“D’you believe in redemption?”
Location 2962

And sometimes, she knew, the kindness of a stranger, or even a casual acquaintance, could be transformative, something to cling to while those closest to you dragged you under in their efforts to help.
Location 2969

For the first time ever, Robin had sex with Matthew that night purely because she could not face the row that would ensue if she refused.
Location 3171

Only love could have justified the havoc they had lived together, or the many times he had resumed the relationship, even while he knew in his soul that it couldn’t work. Love, to Strike, was pain and grief sought, accepted, endured.
Location 3217

Lorelei’s willingness to accept the casualness of their current arrangement did not stem from a shared sense of disengagement, but from a desperation to keep him on almost any terms.
Location 4561

“People always say that,” he grunted. “It is the money, and it isn’t. Because what is money? Freedom, security, pleasure, a fresh chance…"
Location 5643

“You wanted things I couldn’t give you. Every single fucking time, you hated the poverty.”

“I acted like a spoiled bitch,” she said, “I know I did, then I married Jago and I got all those things I thought I deserved and I want to fucking die.”

“It goes beyond holidays and jewelry, Charlotte. You wanted to break me.” Her expression became rigid, as it so often had before the worst outbursts, the truly horrifying scenes. “You wanted to stop me wanting anything that wasn’t you. That’d be the proof I loved you, if I gave up the army, the agency, Dave Polworth, every-bloody-thing that made me who I am.”
Location 6657

"I gave you the best I had to give, and it was never enough,” he said. “There comes a point where you stop trying to save the person who’s determined to drag you down with them.”
Location 6670

"He came from a background that finds anything that deviates from its own conventions and norms to be suspect, unnatural, even dangerous. He was a rich white Conservative male, Mr. Strike, and he felt the corridors of power were best populated exclusively by rich white Conservative males. He sought, in everything, to restore a status quo he remembered in his youth."
Location 7238

“Yet she stayed with him. Of course, people do stay, even when they’re treated abominably."
Location 7260

"... it will go the way it always goes in the press when it all comes out: it will have been my fault, all of it! Because men’s crimes are always ours in the final analysis, aren’t they, Mr. Strike? Ultimate responsibility always lies with the woman, who should have stopped it, who should have acted, who must have known. Your failings are really our failings, aren’t they? Because the proper role of the woman is carer, and there’s nothing lower in this whole world than a bad mother.”
Location 7369

Life had taught him that a great and powerful love could be felt for the most apparently unworthy people, a circumstance that ought, after all, to give everybody consolation.
Location 7394

“You liked it, you liked me being stuck at home, why can’t you admit it?"
Location 7516

I think marriage is nearly always an unfathomable entity, even to the people inside it, Della Winn had said.
Location 7578

“You can bloody hate someone and still wish they gave a shit about you and hate yourself for wishing it.”
Location 7920

Robin took the tissue and, with one hearty blow of her nose, demolished it.
Location 8383

Okay, while Mom and I were walking in Copenhagen (I love that I can say that), I mentioned how delighted I was with the previous Paul Cleave book I had read. She immediately and enthusiastically agreed with my delight, then tried to remember which of his other books she really liked.

Out came Libby and we scrolled through the list at the library, and this was on the list and this was the one she really liked. boom! onto my hold list it went.

I enjoyed the book. There was a small twist at the end, and a couple deux ex machina moments that were somewhat eyerolling, but I enjoyed the book. The timeline of things was completely unrealistic, no kid is going back to school after going from completely blind to revolutionary eye surgery to home in three weeks.

That a kid can go from no sight to depth recognition in moments was also a bit farfetched, too. And not having any infection after the craziness of the surgery bumbling? No.

But, hey, it's fiction. Found out it is Young Adult fiction, which made it fun. I wish I had known it was YA, as I would have approached it differently.

I enjoyed the book. Trust No One is better, but this was still a fun read. If you're a Cleave fan, definitely read it.

That’s the trick to this — keep moving forward fast enough to stop the bad news from catching up.
Page 20

His dad once said that bad news for everybody else is big news for the media. He would often say, It’s human tragedy that keeps them employed.
Page 22

"... your father fell from a great height. He would have died instantly. He wouldn’t have felt a thing.”

“Except he would have,” Joshua says. “He would have felt fear all the way down, and the higher he fell from, the longer he got to feel it.”
Page 23

"You have to plan for how the world is now, not for how it might be. And of course you can hope. We can all hope.”
Page 31

He is lonely. He is bored. He is sad.
Page 54

Dangerous combination.

“Because people who don’t like themselves are drawn to the idea of belittling others online.”
Page 59

Neither of them excelled in school, neither of them went to university, both of them were concerned with current events but never willing to help make change. They didn’t vote, because they didn’t see a point, neither had had a relationship that lasted longer than a few months, and even then those relationships were few and far between.
Page 68

This describes most other people, does it not?

Did everybody else in Simon’s life think so little of him that they actually believe he did those bad things? Of course, he did do them, but why aren’t people doubting that? They can’t know, not for sure, yet they’re quick to believe the worst.
Page 75

The lift arrives. The door opens. She steps in and the guy steps in. He smiles at her and presses the button, then stands in one corner while she stands in the other. She wonders when everybody jumped on the unwritten rule that you couldn’t make conversation in a lift. People can chat in all sorts of situations, they’ll say hi as they pass by on the street, they’ll make chitchat buying groceries, or at a bar, or a sports game, or in a queue — but making small talk with a stranger in a lift is committing a cardinal sin...
Page 92

I was laughing at this one.

I'm the person who stands the wrong way in an elevator so that I can see everyone, and then starts talking.

Hope strung out is still hope, but it feels like hell.
Page 236

The exercise isn’t completely pointless — those who took and uploaded the pictures will all be charged, and hopefully it will send out a message to others willing to do the same stupid thing. Only she doesn’t think it will. The kind of person who takes a photograph of a dead teenage boy and puts it online isn’t the kind of person who understands how society should work.
Page 248

Peterson is one of those guys who use their hands a lot when they talk.
Page 248

Full-body talking. My specialty.

“Dad used to say the world was full of good people willing to do nothing.”

“Your dad is dead,
Page 259

He tells her how normal it was, and in a way that made it more frightening — how can you find monsters when they can live like anybody?
Page 297

This is another Caltech Bookclub read, I started reading it way behind the rest of the readers, so spent much of today reading to catch up. Aaaaaaaaaand, finished it in a day. I do like reading while treadmill walking.

Butler grew up in Pasadena, which is the connection to Caltech for the book club. Previous books were about Caltech scientists or Caltech research or by Techers. This one has a lot of Pasadena in it. It was neat to know where she was describing, even if the Pasadena and Altadena even I knew are as gone as hers.

Butler is known as a science-fiction author. While this book has unexplained time travel as a plot mechanism, no time is spent exploring the phenomenon, making this book not really science fiction in my categorization. It is, however, a seriously good commentary on human nature.

The main character, Dana, is transported back to early 1800s American South. As Dana is black, we read about the atrocities of slavery, as told from a modern person transported back to the brutality of the era. We see how we normalize horrible behaviours, often to survive. We see how we assume power, even when we are one of the powerless. We see how we don't see our own privilege, how seeing another's view is difficult, it not impossible.

I think what's lingering with me most, however, is the slow descent into acceptance that Butler weaves into the story. It reminds me a great deal what Mistakes We Made (but not by me) discusses about human nature: we are all frogs in the pot about to boil.

I appreciated the technological contrast between today and forty years ago in the difficulties that the characters experienced. The story told from 2018 would have been much different in the details. I suspect Dana of 2018 would not have lasted as long as Dana of 1976 did.

I've read other books by Butler, on the strong recommendation from Claire and Susan. So far, all of them have been worth reading. I strongly recommend this book, and reading it for the commentary on human nature.

There were free blacks. You could pose as one of them.”

“Free blacks had papers to prove they were free.”

“You could have papers too. We could forge something …”

“If we knew what to forge. I mean, a certificate of freedom is what we need, but I don’t know what they looked like. I’ve read about them, but I’ve never seen one.”
Page 46

Here's an example of where 2018 Dana could Internet Search™ for an image of freedom papers, and be able to create copies.

Yet, how much would they really matter for a single black woman in the South? Tear them up and she's in the same place as she was without them.

“I’m even crazier than you,” he said. “After all I’m older than you. Old enough to recognize failure and stop dreaming, so I’m told.”
Page 56

After all, how accepting would I be if I met a man who claimed to be from eighteen nineteen—or two thousand nineteen, for that matter.
Page 63

The timing of this cracked me up. 2019! A month away!

“None of them say eighteen-anything either,” said Kevin. “But here.” He picked out a bicentennial quarter and handed it to Rufus.

“Seventeen seventy-six, nineteen seventy-six,” the boy read. “Two dates.”
Page 64

I so love those quarters.

If you have one, send it to me!

I was the worst possible guardian for him—a black to watch over him in a society that considered blacks subhuman, a woman to watch over him in a society that considered women perennial children.
Page 69

Ugh.

"Even here, not all children let themselves be molded into what their parents want them to be."
Page 86

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’m not minimizing the wrong that’s being done here. I just …”

“Yes you are. You don’t mean to be, but you are.”
Page 107

White people. Privilege (such an overused, abused term these days). Explaining away the horrible actions of others as, "not that bad."

“The ease seemed so frightening,” I said. “Now I see why.”

“What?”

“The ease. Us, the children … I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.”
Page 108

One small step at a time.

Down the slippery slope.

Or if I had to stay here, why couldn’t I just turn these two kids away, turn off my conscience, and be a coward, safe and comfortable?
Page 113

When that time came, I could walk away from the agency not owing anybody.

My memory of my aunt and uncle told me that even people who loved me could demand more of me than I could give—and expect their demands to be met simply because I owed them.
Page 117

The pain was a friend. Pain had never been a friend to me before, but now it kept me still.
Page 122

The fire flared up and swallowed the dry paper, and I found my thoughts shifting to Nazi book burnings. Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.
Page 154

“What’s it going to get them?”

“It’ll get them the cowhide if they don’t,” she snapped. “I ain’t goin’ to take the blame for what they don’t do. Are you?”

“Well, no, but …”

“I work. You work. Don’t need somebody behind us all the time to make us work.”
Page 158

The discussion was about why the slaves continue to work, and why some are more motivated that others to work.

“Don’t want to hear no more,” she repeated softly. “Things ain’t bad here. I can get along.” She had done the safe thing—had accepted a life of slavery because she was afraid.
Page 159

Ignorant as I knew I was, I trusted myself more than I trusted her.
Page 161

Don't we all.

Gotten possession of the woman without having to bother with her husband. Now, somehow, Alice would have to accept not only the loss of her husband, but her own enslavement. Rufus had caused her trouble, and now he had been rewarded for it. It made no sense. No matter how kindly he treated her now that he had destroyed her, it made no sense.
Page 163

“My man used to. He’d tell me I was the only one he cared about. Then, next thing I knew, he’d say I was looking at some other man, and he’d go to hittin’.”
Page 165

I went, annoyed, but silent. I thought he could have given me a decent estimate if he had wanted to. But it didn’t really matter. Kevin would receive the letter and he could come to get me. I couldn’t really doubt that Rufus had sent it. He didn’t want to lose my good will anymore than I wanted to lose his. And this was such a small thing.
Page 167

Wow, doesn't this feel like the Princess Bride?

“Mama said she’d rather be dead than be a slave,” she said.

“Better to stay alive,” I said. “At least while there’s a chance to get free.”
Page 172

I went out to the laundry yard to help Tess. I had come to almost welcome the hard work. It kept me from thinking.
Page 178

Better than drinking, maybe.

"All I want you to do is fix it so I don’t have to beat her. You’re no friend of hers if you won’t do that much!"

Of hers!
Page 180

This is totally the thinking of abusers blaming the victims, "You made me do it, you made me beat the holy hell out of you." Um... no.

When she hurt, she struck out to hurt others. But she had been hurting less as the days passed, and striking out less.
Page 181

She went to him. She adjusted, became a quieter more subdued person. She didn’t kill, but she seemed to die a little.
Page 185

Would I really try again? Could I? I moved, twisted myself somehow, from my stomach onto my side. I tried to get away from my thoughts, but they still came. See how easily slaves are made? they said.
Page 196

But he wanted me around—someone to talk to, someone who would listen to him and care what he said, care about him. And I did. However little sense it made, I cared. I must have. I kept forgiving him for things.
Page 198

I wondered whether he had been able to write during the five years, or rather, whether he had been able to publish. I was sure he had been writing. I couldn’t imagine either of us going for five years without writing. Maybe he’d kept a journal or something.
Page 217

In other words, he was sorry. He was always sorry. He would have been amazed, uncomprehending if I refused to forgive him. I remembered suddenly the way he used to talk to his mother. If he couldn’t get what he wanted from her gently, he stopped being gentle. Why not? She always forgave him.
Page 242

She decided to teach me to sew. I had an old Singer at home and I could sew well enough with it to take care of my needs and Kevin’s. But I thought sewing by hand, especially sewing for “pleasure” was slow torture.
Page 243

Before the era of disposable clothing.

He just didn’t like working alone. Actually, he didn’t like working at all. But if he had to do it, he wanted company.
Page 253

Sounds like a number of people I know.

“He’ll never let any of us go,” she said. “The more you give him, the more he wants.”
Page 262

Sometimes I wrote things because I couldn’t say them, couldn’t sort out my feelings about them, couldn’t keep them bottled up inside me. It was a kind of writing I always destroyed afterward. It was for no one else.
Page 282

He lay with his head on my shoulder, his left arm around me, his right hand still holding my hand, and slowly, I realized how easy it would be for me to continue to be still and forgive him even this.

So easy, in spite of all my talk.
Page 290

From the reader's guide at the end of the book:

5. “I never realized how easily people could be trained to accept slavery.” Dana says this to Kevin when they have returned to the present and are discussing their experiences in the antebellum South. Do we also in the twenty-first century still have conditioned responses to slavery?
Page 296

This is book 5 of the Peter Grant series.

I have so been enjoying the Peter Grant series, and strongly recommend them to anyone who enjoys the Dresden Files or the Alex Verus series. A different flavor of the modern-day wizard, urban fantasy story, and one that seems, if one can suspend disbelief, reasonable in terms of "We don't know" and "Let's find out" of magic. That anyone can learn is a premise of the story-line, which I can appreciate.

The book centers around the disappearance of two girls in a small English town (village, hamlet, something...). Initially unsure if there's anything "weird" about their disappearances, that there is a WW2 era practitioner living nearby lends reason to investigate, and Peter does.

The book deals with some of Peter's life frustrations. He's been holding things together, despite some ugh awful things happening. We learn more of Peter's history, more of his family dynamics.

The book was a fast read. There are two more currently published book and one novella in the series. Will definitely keep reading them.

Once Mr. Punch and the M25 were behind me, I tuned the car radio to Five Live, which was doing its best to build a twenty-four-hour news cycle out of about half an hour of news.
Page 8

This cracked me up. Yes about how frustrating news cycles are in order to obtain and keep attention.

Never underestimate the ability of a police driver to misjudge a corner when finally coming home from a twelve-hour shift.
Page 26

Missing kids are tough cases. I mean, murder is bad but at least the worst has already happened to the victim—they’re not going to get any deader. Missing kids come with a literal deadline, made worse by the fact that you don’t get to learn the timing until it’s too late.
Page 27

“Do you think I’m going to get my daughter back?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

Because you’ve got to have hope and no news is good news. And because the best you can do is sound like you’re being forthright and sincere. If they get their kids back they won’t even remember what you said and if they don’t—then nothing else will be important.
Page 41

Hope will kill you.

“My idea?”

“Something suitably weird.”

“That’s a bit presumptuous, isn’t it?” I said.

“Presumptuous is my middle name,” said Dominic.
Page 49

We trooped off behind her into waist high bracken, down something that was not so much a path as a statistical variation in the density of the undergrowth.
Page 52

He called it potentia because there’s nothing quite like Latin for disguising the fact that you’re making it up as you go along.
Page 55

Polidori’s theories were as good as anyone else’s. But sticking a Latin tag on a theory doesn’t make it true. Not true in a way that matters.
Page 56

Absence of evidence, as any good archeologist will tell you, is not the same as evidence of absence.
Page 56

A lot of men must have left their belongings behind in 1944 believing that they were coming back.
Page 61

We all do this. We assume we have more life.

Not always a good assumption.

All your cases, I thought, do not belong to us.
Page 71

This cracked me up. I love the cultural references in these books, even if I do have to look up most of the English ones.

Right, I thought. If you can’t be clever then at least you can be thorough.
Page 89

And everyone can do the work.

During the whole pointless process not one resident refused to let us in or objected to us looking around, which I found creepy because there’s always one. But Dominic said no. “Not in the countryside,” he said.

“Community spirit?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “That and everyone would know that they hadn’t cooperated, which people would find suspicious. In a village that sort of thing sticks for, like, generations.”
Page 90

I wanted to ask where Beverley was, and how the Teme family just happened to have her phone. But if there’s one thing Nightingale has taught me, it’s to let other people talk themselves out before giving anything away.
Page 97

We were pretty certain we knew roughly where he’d been, but members of the public have an unnerving tendency to switch straight from lying to your face to telling you what they think you want to hear—with no intervening period of veracity at all.

That’s fine when you’re looking for them to put their hand up to some crimes and boost your clear-up statistics. But when the lives of two kids depends on the accuracy of the statement, you tend to be a bit more thorough.
Page 103

He told us the truth, although it took ages to pry all the sordid details out. Which just goes to show that if you want a confession, use a telephone book—but if you want the truth, you’ve got to put in the hours.
Page 104

Nightingale says that conspiracies of silence are the only kind of conspiracies that stand the test of time.
Page 107

I woke in the hour before dawn, stuck in that strange state where the memory of your dreams is still powerful enough to motivate your actions.
Page 130

Wow, yes. Those moments are powerful.

Because it’s always a waste of time, all those rushed, angry stupid things you do. They never solve the problems. Because in real life that rush of adrenaline and rage just makes you dumb and seeing red just leads you up the steps to court for something aggravated—assault, battery, stupidity.
Page 149

“Imposing themselves on the landscape”—they’d always called it that on Time Team.

Especially the beardy Iron and Bronze Age specialists—“ The Romans imposed themselves on the landscape.” Or, I thought, they wanted to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
Page 160

“You said that there’s weird shit, but it normally turns out to have a rational explanation.”

“It does,” said Beverley. “The explanation is a wizard did it.”

“That’s my line,” I said, and Beverley shrugged.
Page 161

Again, cracking up.

“Sic transit Gloria mundi,” I said, because it was the first thing that came into my head—we clinked and drank. It could have been worse. I could have said “Valar Morghulis” instead.
Page 187

"Thus passes the glory of the world," in Latin, and "All men must die," in High Valyrian.

Dying here!

I didn’t tell her that I was pretty much legally required to have an adult present—it’s easier to manage people if they maintain a sense of agency.
Page 264

I had one of those “somebody do something” moments when you suddenly have the realization that the person supposed to be doing something is you.
Page 282

The night may be dark and full of terrors, I thought, but I’ve got a big stick.
Page 295

When faced with a low-level hostage situation your first task is to calm the hostage taker down long enough to find out what they want. Then you can lie to them convincingly until you negotiate the hostage back, or are in a position to dog pile the perpetrator.
Page 307

You swear an oath when you become a police officer—you promise to serve the Queen in the office of constable with fairness, integrity and impartiality, and that you will cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offenses against people and property. The very next day you start making the first of the many minor and messy compromises required to get the Job done. But sooner or later the Job walks up to you, pins you against the wall, looks you in the eye and asks you how far you’re willing to go to prevent all offenses. Asks just what did your oath, your attestation, really mean to you?
Page 313

But sometimes the right thing to do is the right thing to do, especially when a child is involved.
Page 314

Okay, most people know who Mickey Mantle is. Most people know my opinion on baseball. And most people who know me know I'm not a fan of biographies. If you didn't know, well, it comes down to it doesn't matter how great the person was, said person was still human, and thus any honest biography is going to show us where our hero stumbled and fell, and off the pedestal they fall. Not a fan, I like my illusions, thank you very much.

And so, we have the biography of Mickey Mantle. Why did I read this book? I'm trying to clean my library hold list, and this one was available. I didn't finish it before it was due, but was able to renew, so there's that.

Mantle was a product of his father and of his time. He had the natural talent, the determination of his father for his son to succeed where he did not, the life-long training, and f'ing bad luck. I understand this last one. The first part maybe not so much.

When I mentioned I was going to read Mantle's biography to Kris, he looked at me surprised. "You know, he was a drunk, right?" I shrugged. "He was also a great," I responded. "Yeah, I met him once."

That exchange stuck with me as I read the book. Here we have someone who was great, who could have been better, and life threw him a couple curveballs he couldn't hit, and alcohol became a coping mechanism. Talk about a tale as old as human history.

So, yeah, the man was a great baseball player. He was nice. He was a drunk. He lived, he coped as best he could, he died. The story was interesting, from the perspective of someone who didn't grow up with baseball, didn't really understand it until well into her adulthood, and wanted a reasonable look at the man's life. I appreciated the biography was written by woman.

If you're a fan of Mantle, don't read the book. If you're a fan of baseball, and understand and accept that idols will fall, the book is worth reading.

He always shot from below, the angle of icons, rendering his subjects larger than life. Clouds and foliage were banished from the frame; nothing was allowed to clutter the image.
Location 111

The photo is a touchstone of another era: when boys were allowed to be boys and it was okay to laugh at them for being themselves, when it was okay not to know and to forgive what you did know.
Location 232

People who loved him and loathed him agree he was an uncommonly honest man, a trait he bequeathed to his family.
Location 276

So how do you write about a man you want to love the way you did as a child but whose actions were often unlovable? How do you reclaim a human being from caricature without allowing him to be fully human? How do you find the light within the darkness without examining the dimensions of both?
Location 308

Tommy Henrich, Old Reliable, was assigned the task of turning him into an outfielder, teaching him how to gauge the angle of the ball off the bat; how to position his body to catch the ball on his back foot and get rid of it in one smooth motion; how to react to a drive hit straight at him.
Page 12

Oh boy.

He called his father and said he wanted to come home. “I was down,
Page 26

“Everybody was in the room. Then we went outside, but you could hear. I heard him say, ‘If that’s all the man you are, then get your clothes and let’s go home.’ Mutt did not yell. He spoke with authority. Mick was crying, of course. He was embarrassed because he wasn’t cutting the pie.”
Page 27

Mantle was too eager and too innocent to understand his dangerous indiscretion.
Page 29

He would play the next seventeen years struggling to be as good as he could be, knowing he would never be as good as he might have become.
Page 37

A clinic opened in Picher in 1927, but it was for the benefit of the mine operators, who were anxious to cull the sick from the workforce. Doctors provided advice but no treatment. Annual X-ray examinations were compulsory. Miners were required to carry a wallet-sized health card certifying that they were free of disease. Those whose X-rays came back positive were fired the same day and could never be hired by another mine.
Page 43

Hate this abuse. If you think about it, it wasn't that long ago.

Leaving a holiday party with Mickey, Sr., one year, Larry paused to embrace their mother. “We get outside, and Mick said, ‘I wish I could do that.’

“And I said, ‘What?’

“He said, ‘Kiss Mom on the cheek like that and hug her.’

“I said, ‘Just walk up and do it.’

“I really felt sorry for him that he couldn’t. Because, my goodness, that must be terrible.”
Page 54

“He was scared to death of everything. Granddad said, ‘I never dreamed he would grow up to be what he was because he was such a sissy.’ ”
Page 54

At Christmas, when all the other children got a pair of socks, there was always enough money to buy him a new baseball glove. He would cry, he later told a friend, because he didn’t get any toys.
Page 56

Playtime was over when Mutt got home from work. Every afternoon was punctuated by the rhythmic bang of the ball against the corrugated metal siding of the ramshackle shed.

“Every day at 4 P.M., Mickey had to be home, no matter where he was or what he was doing, to do batting practice,” Max said. “They’d throw a tennis ball. They’d stand him up against that leaning shed. He’d hit it up against the house. If it hit the ground, it was an out; below the window, a double; above the window, a triple; over the house, a home run. Every day.”
Page 57

If Mickey got out, they all got out. It was a huge—if unarticulated—burden to place on one boy’s shoulders.
Page 58

By the next baseball season, he began to look like a ballplayer. Probably it was just the natural order of things, a boy growing into a man, but the change in him was so immediate and so dramatic, it reinforced belief in a connection between the penicillin and the growth spurt that followed.

“When he got that penicillin in him, boy, his body shot out and the muscles in his arms jumped out,” Mosely said.
Page 63

Greenwade asked why he was pitching instead of playing the infield. “Someone’s got to do it,” he replied.
Page 65

Greenwade, who later claimed he didn’t know Mantle was a switch-hitter until that game, played down his talents when he spoke to Mutt. Marginal prospect. Might make it, might not. Kind of small. Not a major league shortstop. Imagine how galling it must have been every time Mantle heard Greenwade later boast, “The first time I saw Mantle, I knew how Paul Krichell felt when he first saw Lou Gehrig.”
Page 66

“What gripes you about those scouts in those days is they sign a guy out of poverty and he’d make the big leagues and then they’d brag about how cheap they got you,” Terry said.
Page 67

Mantle was afraid the Yankees would send him home before his $750 bonus kicked in on June 30. His insecurity was palpable; teammates found him softhearted and unexpectedly tender.
Page 69

Failure also made him petulant. When Mutt asked Lombardi how Mickey was doing, Lombardi replied, “He’ll be great if he quits pouting.”
Page 70

Gaynor gave him a weighted boot and a set of exercises to strengthen the quadriceps muscle and give support to his knee. Mantle ignored his instructions, preferring, he said later, to sit around, watch TV, and feel sorry for himself.
Page 73

As his friend Joe Warren said, “When you don’t raise your children to make their own decisions, then they grow up and they don’t know how to make decisions.”
Page 81

Without Mutt, there was no one with the moral authority to insist, no one to say no to Mickey Mantle. He would never grant anyone that authority again.
Page 81

Without Mutt, he was adrift, save for the organizational imperatives imposed by the baseball season. Free to make his own decisions, he made bad ones.
Page 81

How did Mantle play with a torn ACL? It can be done, Haas says. “Mickey Mantle can be classified as a ‘neuromuscular genius,’ one of a select few who are so well wired that they are able to compensate for severe injuries like this and still perform at the highest levels, overcoming a particular impairment at a given moment. It is a phenomenon comprised of motivation, high pain threshold, strength, reflexes, and luck.”
Page 111

In 1968, the last spring of Mantle’s career, Soares observed: “Mickey has a greater capacity to withstand pain than any man I’ve ever seen. Some doctors have seen X-rays of his legs and won’t believe they are the legs of an athlete still active.”
Page 111

“Later, the people in the medical department told me he never followed the instructions. I thought he did. He told me he was better. He didn’t follow the directions. I don’t think he followed anyone’s directions. He was a great athlete, a very poor patient.”
Page 113

The point of the argument was having it, not solving it. It was sustaining and somehow defining. Who you chose as your guy told you something about yourself—who you wanted to be and how you wanted to be.
Page 130

Branch Rickey, baseball’s most original thinker, planted the seeds of this new math by hiring the first team statistician in 1947—the same year he and Jackie Robinson defied baseball’s color barrier. Seven years later, he and his stat man, Allan Roth, pioneered the formula for on-base percentage. This arithmetic innovation was met with predictable disdain: “Baseball isn’t statistics,” groused Jimmy Cannon. “Baseball is DiMaggio rounding second.”
Page 134

He would hate what the game became.

Jim Bouton seconded that opinion years later: “Statistics are about as interesting as first base coaches.”
Page 134

Unless you're a stats-geek, and then it's heaven.

By 2001, James, paterfamilias of the stat-geek generation, had conceded that clarity had been all but lost in the numerical dust storm of mutating calculations and
Page 134

Ah. Okay. Heh.

To the gimlet eye of a modern stat geek, walks are the key to Mantle’s superior on-base percentage and the reason he fares so well in a pre ponderance of the new offensive metrics. Nor is Mantle’s self-flagellation over his lifetime .298 batting average warranted.

“He was measuring himself with the yardstick he grew up with in the 1930s,” Thorn said. Little wonder that teammates fulminated at all the “what ifs.”

“I hate it when people say how much he wasted,” said Clete Boyer. “Jesus Christ, how much better could he have been?”
Page 135

Reggie Jackson turned away from tracking the flight of one hundred batting-practice hacks to consider the question of Mickey Mantle and white-skin privilege.

...

It is the one “what if” nobody wants to talk about. If Mickey had been black and Willie had been white, what kind of conversation would there have been? Would there even have been a conversation? How much does race influence the way they are remembered?
Page 136

This confused me at first, because I didn't know about the Mays Mantle comparison. I had no frame of reference for this conversation until I had read through it. I didn't reread it for clarity, though.

I think character flaws bring compassion for all colors.
Page 136

Irvin watched with admiration as Mantle improved himself first as an outfielder and later as a public person. He listened when fantasy campers asked Mantle the question.

“‘Well,’ he’d say, ‘Mays was a better fielder. I had more power and hit the ball farther.’ He came out and told the truth.

“He made people like him. I told Willie, ‘You should be a little more personable. They’d like you the way they like Mickey.’

“But he never did.”
Page 138

Mickey shrugged. “He had to do it. He did it to Willie. He made his mistake when he did it to Willie. In the back of my mind it bugs me a little. It sounds worse than it is. A guy or two said, ‘Jesus Christ, you were my boyhood idol, now you’re banned. You must have done something bad.’ I feel really kind of bad no one took up for me. It’s, like, ‘Well, fine, he’s gone.’ ” Mays took up for him, sort of. “He’s never gonna harm baseball or anybody else,” Mays said. “The only one he ever harmed was himself.”
Page 143

He decided to lighten the mood with a joke. “God calls Saint Peter over, and he says, ‘Saint Peter, I was down on Earth and I made this man and this woman and I forgot to put their sexual organs on them. You take this pecker and this pussy down there and put ’em on them.’ “Saint Peter says, ‘Okay.’ And he’s getting ready to leave, and God says, ‘Be sure to put the pussy on the short, dumb one.’ ”
Page 143

Yeah, did I mention the fall off the pedestal?

Recklessness was always part of his charm, his cheerful, who-gives-a-fuck élan. But with each increasingly precarious turn threatening to upend the cart, with every vicious twist of his lower body as he swung through the ball, his limp became more pronounced and the consequences of his wildness more patent.
Page 146

That fall, in the sixth inning of game 4 of the World Series, Roebuck threw him a sinker that “hung out over the plate.” Not for long. Duke Snider admired the parabolic view in center field.

“I don’t mind you not charging it,” Roebuck told him later. “But you don’t have to stop to see how far it went.” Roebuck understood: length is a guy thing. Size matters.

“Seriously,” he said, laughing. “That’s what made the male regard Mantle that way. Forget God. Mickey Mantle can hit the ball farther than anybody.”
Page 156

Mantle had no idea what he did right or wrong or differently batting right-handed and left-handed. More than likely he would have had little truck with present-day baseball pedagogy.
Page 157

They don’t talk baseball; they discuss the “relationship amongst the sweet spot, COP, and vibration nodes in baseball bats,” the topic of a treatise published in Proceedings of the 5th Conference of Engineering of Sport.
Page 157

Kandel, a physician trained in psychiatry and neurobiology, explained: “There are two kinds of memories. They’re called implicit and explicit. Explicit memory is a memory of people, places, and objects. If you think of the last time you sat in a baseball stadium and remember who you were with, you’re doing explicit memory storage. “Implicit memory storage is hitting a tennis ball, hitting a baseball, doing anything that involves sensory motor skills.”
Page 158

Kandel was in a conversation I recently had with Bob. I'll likely add his latest book to my reading pile, really soon, like, done.

Muscle memory is a form of implicit memory that is recalled through performance, Kandel said, “without conscious effort or even the awareness that we are drawing on memory.”
Page 158

It’s also why the greatest athletes usually make the lousiest coaches.
Page 158

Let me tell you a story about Tyler Grant.

... forcing them to articulate what they do and how they do it, their performance deteriorates. Compelled to surrender what he calls “expertise-induced amnesia”—in short, to make an implicit memory explicit again—“ they start thinking about what they’re doing and mess everything up,” he said.
Page 158

The brain can bulk up, too. Repeated experience can form new synaptic connections, especially if you start building up those implicit memories before puberty. The right genes nurtured the right way—meaning early enough and often enough—creates the potential for a particular kind of genius.
Page 158

A 90-mile-per-hour fastball doesn’t leave much time for thought. Traveling at a rate of 132 feet per second, it makes the sixty-foot, six-inch journey from pitcher to batter in four-tenths of a second. The ball is a quarter of the way to home plate by the time a hitter becomes fully aware of it. Because there is a 100-millisecond delay between the time the image of the ball hits the batter’s retina and when he becomes conscious of it, it is physiologically impossible to track the ball from the pitcher’s hand to the catcher’s glove.
Page 160

Neurologically speaking, every batter is a guess-hitter. That’s where implicit memory comes in. The ability to infer the type of pitch and where it’s headed with accuracy and speed is inextricably linked with stored experience—the hitter has seen that pitch before, even if he can’t see it all the way.
Page 160

“The report was, you had to jam him,” said Osteen, then in the eighth of his eighteen years in the majors. “If you’ve got a guy like Mantle who’s standing miles away from the plate, where there is so much daylight between the inside corner and his hands, it’s frightening. It’s right down the middle of the plate for a guy like that.”
Page 162

“I went in there. It was a fastball, right on the black,” he said. “Right away he went straight into the ball and closed that daylight up.”
Page 162

The margin of error was a sliver of daylight. Which explains why when he was asked how he had pitched to Mantle, the late Frank Sullivan said, “With tears in my eyes.”
Page 162

“Oh, that night,” Carmen Berra said, recalling Billy Martin’s twenty-ninth birthday, the last one before you get old.
Page 163

Baseball writers ate, drank, and traveled with the team. Their tab was often paid by the team. “You couldn’t write one word of it, the debauchery,” said Jack Lang, the longtime executive secretary of the Baseball Writers Association of America. “It wasn’t just liquor. It was the women.”
Page 171

The locker room code of honor was inviolable: What happens in the clubhouse stays in the clubhouse—even if it doesn’t take place in the clubhouse.
Page 171

“The Yankee clubhouse was, like, below street level,” Mantle told me. “We had windows, like, where people are walking along. Girls used to come stand there, and we used to shoot water guns up in their puss. We could see ’em kind of flinch. They’d be looking around trying to figure out where the fuck that water is coming from.”
Page 173

Mantle once said that Martin was the only guy he knew who “could hear someone give him the finger.” He negotiated life with a chip on his shoulder, and those in the know gave him a wide berth.
Page 180

Yet Billy Martin’s birthday party was a watershed event, and not just because it gave Weiss the occasion to trade him. It was the day sportswriting began to grow up. The era of hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil could not withstand TV’s increasingly intrusive cathode glare or the skepticism of an irreverent cohort of young sportswriters for whom questioning authority was a generational prerogative.
Page 183

Mantle sat out game 5, the ninth World Series game he had missed due to injury, and the Yankees lost 1–0. They won game 6 without him but lost game 7—and the World Series—despite his return to the lineup. His throwing arm would never be the same.
Page 184

“Guided differently, he could have done better for himself as a human being,” Jerry Coleman said. “He would have liked himself more.”
Page 185

And the guy poured him at least two more jiggers in that one, and he threw that one down. He wanted that anesthetic feeling up there in the prefrontal lobe.”
Page 188

She never could get accustomed to the familial reserve. “Mick’s family was cold,” she told me. “They didn’t visit. He didn’t visit.” And when they did pay a call, they didn’t show up emotionally.

“Nobody would talk. It was weird. Nobody would say anything,” Merlyn told me. “And the only way they could really talk was when everybody got bombed. Everybody had to have the beer. They could not relax and visit with each other unless they were having beers.”

“All they said was hello and goodbye,” Danny Mantle said.
Page 188

His people skills—emotional intelligence in modern parlance—made a lasting impression on Mark Freeman during the brief time they played together in 1959. “I think he’s basically one of the most decent guys I’ve ever met,” he told Leonard Schecter of the Post.
Page 239

Beat writers suspected there was another Mantle, one who didn’t begin every conversation with “Fuck you” or “Go fuck yourself” or, when he was pressed for time, just plain “Fuck.”
Page 240

Heh.

He was a guy’s guy who called everyone “bud” or “pard.” But he cried easily. He wept at mournful country-western tunes, and at the morning headlines. “Somebody got killed or something, he’d get tears in his eyes,” Irv Noren said.
Page 240

In the clubhouse, Mantle shed the residue of bias he had brought with him from Commerce.
Page 242

One in the plus column.

“He’d say, C’mon, there’s a great place across the street.’ One of his favorites was having Coke and milk together. After a while it really didn’t taste too bad. He loved that drink. He’d have it even on airplanes. It’s like a root beer float.”
Page 242

He replied to the incessant inquiries for medical updates by pinning a sign to his chest: “Slight improvement. Back in two weeks. Don’t ask.”
Page 246

It was his first—albeit unacknowledged—hangover home run. “Pinch-hit, eighth or ninth inning, when he was too drunk to play,” Linz said, one of perhaps three or four times he saw Mantle play in that condition.
Page 246

This was the only time the bat actually bent in his hands.
Page 251

This would have been amazing to see.

By the time the morning papers rolled off the presses, the “Man of Mishaps” had been transmogrified into “a tragic figure,” “the champion hard-luck guy,” and “the most fabulous invalid in the long history of sport.”
Page 256

The Yankees were trailing by a run in the bottom of the seventh inning of the second game when Mantle emerged from the dugout to pinch-hit. The ovation began at the bat rack and reached a crescendo when Bob Sheppard announced his name. The roar “shook the windows of the Bronx County Courthouse,” one paper said.

Equally shaken, Mantle dug his spikes into the dirt on the right side of the plate and told himself, “Don’t just stand there and take three pitches—swing.” The Orioles were well aware that it was his first at-bat since the injury in Baltimore.

“Big George Brunet was on the mound,” Brooks Robinson said. “He just reared back and threw on every pitch.” Brunet threw one pitch, which Mantle took for a called strike, and then another. “Mantle swung his bat in anger for the first time in 61 games,” the Times reported, redirecting the ball into the left field stands.

“The most amazing thing is, it was not a pitch that most right-handed hitters are ever gonna get airborne,” Downing said. “And not only was it airborne, it was airborne about twenty feet off the ground and just hit those seats and ricocheted like a rocket!”

Mantle wasn’t sure he had pulled the ball enough. When the umpire signaled home run, he thought, “Gee, I’m a lucky stiff.” He broke into a cold sweat and something that resembled a trot. Later, he said he wasn’t sure how he made it around the bases and, in fact, didn’t remember doing so.

The roar of adulation eclipsed the two-minute standing ovation that had greeted him when he hobbled to the plate. It got louder and louder as he headed toward home. The Orioles applauded silently. “Gives you chills standing over there at first base,” Powell said. “Just being in the ballpark gave you chills.”

As Mantle rounded third base, Brooks Robinson thought “That’s why he’s Mickey Mantle.” By the time he reached home plate, “there was tears runnin’ all over his face,” Yankee pitcher Stan Williams said. He noticed because it was one of the rare occasions when Mantle allowed the outside world to see “how much it meant to him, how much the fans meant to him, how much the moment meant to him.”
Page 257

“Mantle hit the most god-awful tomahawk-swing line drive into the left field bleachers,” McCormick said.

“Over the hedges,” Bauer said. “Honest to God, I didn’t think he’d make it around the bases,” Boyer said.

“He kinda sobered his way around,” McCormick said. He would hear about it for the rest of his career: “Even the drunks can hit home runs off of you.”
Page 260

The sparse crowd was treated to an unfamiliar sight: Mantle batted right-handed against the right-hander, a transgression his father had abhorred. The departure in form was duly noted upstairs in the press box. Queried about it later, Mantle said he wanted to see if he could hit behind the runner batting from the right side.
Page 260

This amused me. I love that he was still experimenting.

“I got my butt chewed pretty bad. I said, ‘Eddie, what difference does it make?’

“We played baseball for fun.”
Page 261

“Then he struck him out with a fastball around the letters,” Roseboro said. “Mantle looked back at me and said, ‘How in the fuck are you supposed to hit that shit?’”
Page 262

Kids who imitated his stiff-legged arrival at second base didn’t realize it was the only way he could bring himself to a stop.
Page 267

Mickey had two different batting strokes: right-handed, he would hit on top of the ball. He would tomahawk the ball. Even his home runs to left field, a lot of ’em were line drives with top spin on ’em. They get out there real quick and sink and dive down into the bleachers. Left-handed, he undercut the ball. So here’s Barney Schultz throwing right into his power. Barney Schultz’s ball is breaking down, and Mickey’s bat goes down and . . .”
Page 268

Mantle stood in. Schultz wound up. McCarver knew right away: “Nothing good was gonna come of this pitch.” It didn’t dance or flutter or defy expectation. It didn’t do anything at all.

“It wasn’t thrown,” McCarver said. “It was dangled like bait to a big fish. Plus it lingered in that area that was down, and Mickey was a lethal low-ball hitter left-handed. The pitch was so slow that it allowed him to turn on it and pull"
Page 269

“When he left at 6: 30 A.M., Mickey and Whitey were in no condition to play baseball,” Lolich said. “He had done his job as far as he was concerned. He said, the next day Whitey pitched nine innings of shutout ball and Mantle hit two home runs.”
Page 272

There are two kinds of baseball fans: those who bellow invective at the opposition no matter what and those who stand for a worthy adversary.
Page 280

“I wake up most every day at 5: 30 or 6: 00 A.M.,” he said. “All those dreams.” A medley of recurring nightmares that make the long nights longer. Missed trains, missed planes, missed curfews—missed opportunities. “The hard part is just getting through it,” he said. Buses don’t stop. Fly balls don’t fly. Doors no longer open for The Mick. “I always felt I should have played longer.”
Page 285

“People have always placed Joe and Mickey on a pedestal,” Tony Kubek told Daily News columnist Bill Madden years later. “The difference is Joe always liked being there and Mickey never felt like he belonged.”
Page 291

His jealousy was palpable. “He would never look at Mickey Mantle until Mickey spoke to him—every time,” Clete Boyer said. “Mickey never said a bad word to the public about Joe D. Just to us.”
Page 291

When he was in Dallas, Mantle organized his life around the clubhouse at Preston Trail, the posh all-male Dallas golf club he had joined as a charter member in 1965, trying to re-create the camaraderie of the locker room.
Page 299

“Near the end he was really terrible to her, humiliating her,” said a friend who spent time with them at the Claridge. “She’d say she wanted to go to the hairdresser and ask for money. Mick would peel off a $ 1 bill and hand it to her in front of people, making her grovel.”
Page 312

Sometimes he spoke of suicide. “I’m not sure he cared if he died,” Merlyn told me. “Mick just felt guilty. He wanted to lay down on the railroad tracks.”

“The misery would be over,” David said.
Page 341

Mantle told him about seeing Ryne Duren on TV talking about his recovery. “That guy, when he was playing ball, was a wreck and he whipped it. He goes around talking, and he does a lot of good. If I can go out there and come back and the fact that I’ve whipped the drinking can help somebody else, then, sure, I want that known.”
Page 343

Somewhere, sometime, he figured out that the best defense isn’t a good offense—it’s being as offensive as humanly possible. He deflected scrutiny like an unhittable pitch hacking away, until he got something he could handle. Most people never saw through it. The rest quit trying.
Page 360

Bob Costas gave the eulogy, speaking for the child he once was, the children we all were before Mickey Mantle forced us to grow up and see the world as it is, not as we wished it to be.
Page 382

I really liked and enjoyed this book. I hadn't read anything by Claire North, yet she joins the surprisingly large number of authors who have books I want to read, but I read a different book by the author instead.

I'm glad I did. This was such a fun read.

Harry August was born in 1919, died in 1989, and was born in 1919 to live his life over again. Given the era of his childhood and his death being three years before the release of the film Groundhog Day, it isn't surprising that the second time through, he pretty much did what most people would do: went insane. The third time through, though, hey, wait a moment.

Honestly, if I had a chance to redo life with all my memories of the previous life / lives, I would be so f'ing full of "HOT DAMN!" I'd likely be labeled insane from giddism. Is that a word? Is now.

I'd probably start to worry about the boredom of never dying sometime past the thirty or fortieth time through. Pretty sure I'd be able to figure out how not to come back when I was truly and goodly done.

I'd also hide immediately, along the lines of the Remembrance of Earth's Past idea that there's likely someone more powerful out there with greater skills, best stay hidden. Or was that After On and being the first sentient computer?

Anyway. Harry. We lurves the Harry.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I strongly recommend this book for any science fiction fan. I recommended it to my mom, and she doesn't read science fiction, I enjoyed it that much.

In my first life I enlisted of my own volition, genuinely believing the three great fallacies of the time – that the war would be brief, that the war would be patriotic and that the war would advance me in my skills.
Page 14

I had spent an entire life praying for a miracle, and none had come. And now I looked at the stuffy chapel of my ancestors and saw vanity and greed, heard the call to prayer and thought of power, smelled incense and wondered at the waste of it all.
Page 19

I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department. She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a woman – and she judged them for being idiots. “The benefit being,” she explained, “that I can be both a woman and a fucking brilliant surgeon, but they’ll always only be idiots.”
Page 33

They say that the mind cannot remember pain; I say it barely matters, for even if the physical sensation is lost, our recollection of the terror that surrounds it is perfect.
Page 36

Time is not wisdom; wisdom is not intellect. I am still capable of being overwhelmed; he overwhelmed me.
Page 40

I told him to study the Great Game, to research the Pashtun, look at a map.
Page 44

Oooooo! I know this reference! Thanks, Moazam!

I was out of shape, having never been in much of a shape to get out of, and my confinement had hardly aided the process.
Page 57

“I am honoured. But if your complaint is that ethics have no place in pure science, I’m afraid I must be forced to disagree with you.”

“Of course they don’t! Pure science is no more and no less than the logical process of deduction and experimentation upon observable events. It has no good or bad about it, merely right or wrong in a strictly mathematical definition. What people do with that science is cause for ethical debate, but it is not for the true scientist to concern themselves with that. Leave it to the politicians and philosophers.”
Page 70

“You can’t say you’re not expecting to achieve a thing, then express resentment that others agree with you.”
Page 72

Cancer is a process on which the healthy cannot impose.
Page 89

Private Harry Brookes poured his heart out to a distant stranger who made no reply, but I knew that what I needed was not so much the comfort of return, but to speak of what I had been. The telling was all, the reply merely a courtesy.
Page 89

"I was bleeding out of my insides I stood there and said, ‘I am a daughter of this beautiful land, and I will never participate in the ugliness of your regime!’ And when they shot me, it was the most magnificent I had ever been."
Page 151

Blackmail is surprisingly difficult to pull off. The art lies in convincing the target that whatever harm they do themselves – for, by definition, you are compelling them rather than coaxing them into obedience – is less than the harm which will be caused by the revelation of the secrets in your power.

More often than not the blackmailer overplays their hand, and nothing is achieved except grief. A light touch and, more importantly, an understanding of when to back away is vital to achieve success.
Page 153

Short of a society where religion obligated modesty, a Russian winter could do wonders for thwarting facial recognition.
Page 155

"I don’t understand what drives you. You have wealth, time and the world at your feet, but all you do is push, push and keep on pushing at things which really don’t bother you."
Page 162

In truth, my own words rang hollow in my ears. I spoke fine sentiments about participation in the world around us, and yet what was my participation to be?
Page 162

“Linears only have one life,” she said at last, “and they don’t bother to change anything. It’s just not convenient. Some do. Some… ‘great’ men, or angry men, or men that have been beaten so low that all they have left to do is fight back and change the world. But, Harry, if there is one feature most common to ‘great’ men, it’s that they’re nearly always alone.”
Page 163

“Only one thing surprises me any more,” she explained, “and that’s the things people admit when they’re pissed.”
Page 163

I spent the long waiting hours sitting in the silence and the dark, reproaching myself for my lack of self-reproach. A self-defeating exercise, but even when the logical absurdity of my own thought processes became apparent to me, I was rather annoyed that even this slim manifestation of conscience was so intellectual.
Page 165

Rationality, if not intellect, can still overwhelm alcohol when death is on the line.
Page 166

Are you God, Dr August? Are you the only living creature that matters? Do you think, because you remember it, that your pain is bigger and more important? Do you think, because you experience it, that your life is the only life that gets counted?
Page 211

Problem is, you’ve gone soft. You’ve got used to the comfy life, and the great thing about the comfy life is no one who has it is ever gonna risk rocking the boat. You should learn to live a little, rough it out –I’m telling you, there’s no greater high.”
Page 216

Knowledge is not a substitute for ingenuity, merely an accelerant.
Page 224

In another time, I felt, I would have enjoyed Soviet Dave’s company, and wondered just what stories lurked behind his polite veneer, to have made him a security man.
Page 226

I waited with the light out in my room for the dead hour of the night when the mind shifts into a numb, timeless daze of voiceless thought.
Page 228

The secret to being unafraid of the darkness is to challenge the darkness to fear you, to raise your eyes sharp to those few souls who stagger by, daring them to believe that you are not, in fact, more frightening than they are.
Page 228

The doctrine I spouted was, in fact, absolutely correct for the times we lived in, but I had underestimated how quickly the times changed and, vitally, how much more important the interpretations of rivals were than the truth of what you said.
Page 291

No one ever considers the question of bladder when dealing with matters of subterfuge.
Page 296

Or when writing fiction...

Armies tend to exploit science faster than civilians, if only because their need tends to be more urgent.
Page 322

I also believe that single-minded dedication to just one thing, without rest, respite or distraction, is only conducive to migraines, not productivity.
Page 345

She was an Indian mystic, one of the first to realise that the most profitable way to be enlightened was to spread her enlightenment to concerned Westerners who hadn’t had enough cultural opportunities to nurture their cynicism.
Page 385

Okay, here we go, traipsing both down memory lane AND across the periodic table. I so much enjoyed this book. It took me a while to read it, however, and I totally missed the Caltech Bookclub meetings about it. I ended up checking it out from two different libraries for a total of three checkouts, not because it wasn't interesting, but rather because I needed to just start reading it.

The book is all about the periodic table, its history and its current state. Kean gives us stories about the different parts of the table, along with the stories of the main characters in its development, including those who sidetracked along the way.

Kean discusses the various parts of the periodic table, going through the chemistry and the physics of different elements, along with the science of finding the elements and the politics of naming them.

So... much... fun.

Probably helped that a lot of it happened at Tech and at Berkeley.

If you like science, this is a good book. If you enjoy pondering the periodic table even a hundredth as much as I do (yes, I have it memorized!), I strongly recommend this book. Even if you don't even think about the periodic table much, it still makes a great book to read to the kids before bed.

The discovery of eka-aluminium, now known as gallium, raises the question of what really drives science forward — theories, which frame how people view the world, or experiments, the simplest of which can destroy elegant theories.
Page 54

Melts in your hand! Geranium doesn't!

And after such a breakthrough, Böttger reasonably expected his freedom. Unfortunately, the king decided he was now too valuable to release and locked him up under tighter security.
Page 61

But if Ytterby had the proper economic conditions to make mining profitable and the proper geology to make it scientifically worthwhile, it still needed the proper social climate.
Page 61

They’re neither created nor destroyed: elements just are.
Page 65

Since the pinprick that existed back then, fourteen billion years ago, contained all the matter in the universe, everything around us must have been ejected from that speck.
Page 65

And if you’re looking for truly exotic materials, astronomers believe that Jupiter’s erratic magnetic field can be explained only by oceans of black, liquid “metallic hydrogen.” Scientists have seen metallic hydrogen on earth only for nanoseconds under the most exhaustively extreme conditions they can produce.
Page 70

Sure, promethium was useless, but scientists, of all people, cheer impractical discoveries, and the completion of the periodic table was epochal, the culmination of millions of man-hours.
Page 103

Yasssss.

At this point, rooms full of young women with pencils (many of them scientists’ wives, who’d been hired to help out because they were crushingly bored in Los Alamos) would get a sheet with the random numbers and begin to calculate (sometimes without knowing what it all meant) how the neutron collided with a plutonium atom; whether it was gobbled up; how many new neutrons if any were released in the process; how many neutrons those in turn released; and so on.
Page 108

Other elements absorb extra neutrons like alcoholics do another shot at the bar — they’ll get sick someday but not for eons.
Page 113

The New Yorker staff answered, “We are already at work in our office laboratories on ‘newium’ and ‘yorkium.’ So far we just have the names.”
Page 116

But his first major scientific discovery, which propelled him to those other honors, was the result of dumb luck.
Page 116

As many inventions and discoveries are, alas.

A little childishly, he never earned more than a bachelor’s degree, not wanting to subject himself to more schooling.
Page 118

Cracked me up.

Jokes aside, much of a generation of Soviet science was squandered extracting nickel and other metals for Soviet industry.
Page 124

Hate politics like this.

“Leave [physicists] in peace,” Stalin graciously allowed. “We can always shoot them later.”
Page 125

However, though good science itself, Mendeleev’s work encouraged a lot of bad science, since it convinced people to look for something they were predisposed to find.
Page 138

Confirmation bias is a bitch.

Given that nationalism had destroyed Europe a decade earlier, other scientists did not look kindly on those Teutonic, even jingoistic names — both the Rhine and Masuria had been sites of German victories in World War I.
Page 139

In fact, Lawrence blurted out, oblivious to the Italian’s feelings, how happy he was to save $184 per month to spend on equipment, like his precious cyclotron. Ouch. This was further proof that Lawrence, for all his skill in securing funds and directing research, was obtuse with people.
Page 141

“Fission… escaped us, although it was called specifically to our attention by Ida Noddack, who sent us an article in which she clearly indicated the possibility…. The reason for our blindness is not clear.”

(As a historical curiosity, he might also have pointed out that the two people who came closest to discovering fission, Noddack and Irène Joliot-Curie — daughter of Marie Curie — and the person who eventually did discover it, Lise Meitner, were all women.)
Page 142

Yeah. The "reason" is not clear. Right.

It’s not clear why Pauling bothered to have someone check him if he wasn’t going to listen, but Pauling’s reason for ignoring the student is clear. He wanted scientific priority — he wanted every other DNA idea to be considered a knockoff of his.
Page 147

If certain bacteria, fungi, or algae inch across something made of copper, they absorb copper atoms, which disrupt their metabolism (human cells are unaffected). The microbes choke and die after a few hours. This effect — the oligodynamic, or “self-sterilizing,” effect — makes metals more sterile than wood or plastic and explains why we have brass doorknobs and metal railings in public places.
Page 168

Never underestimate spite as a motivator for genius.
Page 179

I need this on a t-shirt.

Hundreds died within weeks — further proof that when it comes to panaceas the credulity of human beings is boundless.
Page 181

After determining that life has a bias toward handedness on a deep level, Pasteur suggested that chirality was the sole “well-marked line of demarcation that at the present can be drawn between the chemistry of dead matter and the chemistry of living matter.”

If you’ve ever wondered what defines life, chemically there’s your answer.
Page 181

The clever part was that both the chiral catalyst with the rhodium atom and the target 2D molecule were sprawling and bulky. So when they approached each other to react, they did so like two obese animals trying to have sex.
Page 183

Panic never kicks in, despite the lack of oxygen. That might seem incredible if you’ve ever been trapped underwater. The instinct not to suffocate will buck you to the surface. But our hearts, lungs, and brains actually have no gauge for detecting oxygen.

Those organs judge only two things: whether we’re inhaling some gas, any gas, and whether we’re exhaling carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide dissolves in blood to form carbonic acid, so as long as we purge CO2 with each breath and tamp down the acid, our brains will relax.

It’s an evolutionary kludge, really. It would make more sense to monitor oxygen levels, since that’s what we crave. It’s easier — and usually good enough — for cells to check that carbonic acid is close to zero, so they do the minimum.
Page 188

More than anything, politics proved the folly of scientists burying their heads in lab work and hoping the world around them figured out its problems as tidily as they did their equations.
Page 205

After years of willed invisibility, Meitner was suddenly subject to Nazi pogroms. And when a colleague, a chemist, tried to turn her in, she had no choice but to flee, with just her clothes and ten deutsch marks.
Page 218

The eka-lanthanum Joliot-Curie had found was plain lanthanum, the fallout of the first tiny nuclear explosions! Hevesy, who saw early drafts of Joliot-Curie’s papers from that time, later reminisced on how close she’d come to making that unimaginable discovery. But Joliot-Curie, Hevesy said, “didn’t trust herself enough” to believe the correct interpretation. Meitner trusted herself, and she convinced Hahn that everyone else was wrong.
Page 218

He had read Goethe in the original German and found him mediocre. I was still young enough to be impressed by any strong convictions, and the denunciation made me suspicious of Goethe as a great thinker. Years
Page 240

He did so with all the enthusiasm of a dilettante, and about as much competence.
Page 240

As usual, Goethe picked the losing side because it pleased him aesthetically.
Page 241

In the late 1920s, the legendary Hungarian (and later American) designer László Moholy-Nagy drew an academic distinction between “forced obsolescence” and “artificial obsolescence.” Forced obsolescence is the normal course of things for technologies, the roughage of history books: plows gave way to reapers, muskets to Gatling guns, wooden boat hulls to steel.

In contrast, artificial obsolescence did and increasingly would dominate the twentieth century, Moholy-Nagy argued. People were abandoning consumer goods not because the goods were superannuated, but because the Joneses had some newer, fancier design. Moholy-Nagy — an artist and something of a philosopher of design — couched artificial obsolescence as materialistic, infantile, and a “moral disintegration.”
Page 244

He had read and absorbed Moholy-Nagy’s theories of design, but instead of letting the moral reproach of artificial obsolescence hem him in, Parker saw it in true American fashion: a chance to make a lot of money. If people had something better to buy, they would, even if they didn’t need
Page 245

Either way, the name fit the confessional poet, who exemplified the mad artist — someone like van Gogh or Poe, whose genius stems from parts of the psyche most of us cannot access, much less harness for artistic purposes.
Page 251

Special proteins attach to people’s DNA each morning, and after a fixed time they degrade and fall off. Sunlight resets the proteins over and over, so they hold on much longer. In fact, the proteins fall off only after darkness falls — at which point the brain should “notice” the bare DNA and stop producing stimulants.
Page 253

Many artists report feeling flatlined or tranquilized on lithium.
Page 254

Though an essential trace nutrient in all animals (in humans, the depletion of selenium in the bloodstream of AIDS patients is a fatally accurate harbinger of death), selenium is toxic in large doses.
Page 258

what pathological science is not. It’s not fraud, since the adherents of a pathological science believe they’re right — if only everyone else could see it. It’s not pseudoscience, like Freudianism and Marxism, fields that poach on the imprimatur of science yet shun the rigors of the scientific method.

It’s also not politicized science, like Lysenkoism, where people swear allegiance to a false science because of threats or a skewed ideology. Finally, it’s not general clinical madness or merely deranged belief.

It’s a particular madness, a meticulous and scientifically informed delusion. Pathological scientists pick out a marginal and unlikely phenomenon that appeals to them for whatever reason and bring all their scientific acumen to proving its existence.
Page 259

But the game is rigged from the start: their science serves only the deeper emotional need to believe in something.
Page 259

A pathological science takes advantage of that caution. Basically, its believers use the ambiguity about evidence as evidence — claiming that scientists don’t know everything and therefore there’s room for my pet theory, too.
Page 260

But what really makes the ongoing hunt for megalodons pathological is that doubt from the establishment only deepens people’s convictions.
Page 263

Still, a few skeptics, especially at Cal Tech, seethed. Cold fusion upset these men’s scientific sensibilities, and Pons and Fleischmann’s arrogance upset their modesty.
Page 265

One word, little t. Caltech, please.

Whenever pure tin tools or tin coins or tin toys got cold, a whitish rust began to creep over them like hoarfrost on a window in winter. The white rust would break out into pustules, then weaken and corrode the tin, until it crumbled and eroded away. Unlike iron rust, this was not a chemical reaction. As scientists now know, this happens because tin atoms can arrange themselves inside a solid in two different ways, and when they get cold, they shift from their strong “beta” form to the crumbly, powdery “alpha” form.
Page 279

Various European cities with harsh winters (e.g., St. Petersburg) have legends about expensive tin pipes on new church organs exploding into ash the instant the organist blasted his first chord. (Some pious citizens were more apt to blame the Devil.)
Page 280

Scientists can now coax ice into forming fourteen distinctly shaped crystals by using high-pressure chambers. Some ices sink rather than float in water, and others form not six-sided snowflakes, but shapes like palm leaves or heads of cauliflower.
Page 282

Some cosmologists today calculate that our entire universe burst into existence when a single submicronanobubble slipped free from that foam and began expanding at an exponential rate. It’s a handsome theory, actually, and explains a lot — except, unfortunately, why this might have happened.
Page 308

The first complex organic molecules may have formed not in the turbulent ocean, as is commonly thought, but in water bubbles trapped in Arctic-like sheets of ice. Water is quite heavy, and when water freezes, it crushes together dissolved “impurities,” such as organic molecules, inside bubbles. The concentration and compression in those bubbles might have been high enough to fuse those molecules into self-replicating systems.
Page 309

Oklo was powered by nothing but uranium, water, and blue-green algae (i.e., pond scum). Really. Algae in a river near Oklo produced excess oxygen after undergoing photosynthesis. The oxygen made the water so acidic that as it trickled underground through loose soil, it dissolved the uranium from the bedrock.

All uranium back then had a higher concentration of the bomb-ready uranium-235 isotope — about 3 percent, compared to 0.7 percent today. So the water was volatile already, and when underground algae filtered the water, the uranium was concentrated in one spot, achieving a critical mass. Though necessary, a critical mass wasn’t sufficient.

In general, for a chain reaction to occur, uranium nuclei must not only be struck by neutrons, they must absorb them. When pure uranium fissions, its atoms shoot out “fast” neutrons that bounce off neighbors like stones skipped across water.

Those are basically duds, wasted neutrons. Oklo uranium went nuclear only because the river water slowed the neutrons down enough for neighboring nuclei to snag them. Without the water, the reaction never would have begun. But there’s more. Fission also produces heat, obviously.

And the reason there’s not a big crater in Africa today is that when the uranium got hot, it boiled the water away. With no water, the neutrons became too fast to absorb, and the process ground to a halt. Only when the uranium cooled down did water trickle back in — which slowed the neutrons and restarted the reactor. It was a nuclear Old Faithful, self-regulating, and it consumed 13,000 pounds of uranium over 150,000 years at sixteen sites around Oklo, in on/ off cycles of 150 minutes.
Page 323

Wow.

Almost all life forms use metallic elements in trace amounts to create, store, or shuttle energetic molecules around inside them. Animals primarily use the iron in hemoglobin, but the earliest and most successful forms of life, especially blue-green algae, used magnesium.
Page 328

And because Einstein determined that space and time are intertwined, some physicists believe that alpha variations in time could imply alpha variations across space. According to this theory, just as life arose on earth and not the moon because earth has water and an atmosphere, perhaps life arose here, on a seemingly random planet in a seemingly unremarkable pocket of space, because only here do the proper cosmological conditions exist for sturdy atoms and full molecules.
Page 330

First are superatoms. These clusters — between eight and one hundred atoms of one element — have the eerie ability to mimic single atoms of different elements. For instance, thirteen aluminium atoms grouped together in the right way do a killer bromine: the two entities are indistinguishable in chemical reactions. This happens despite the cluster being thirteen times larger than a single bromine atom and despite aluminium being nothing like the lacrimatory poison-gas staple. Other combinations of aluminium can mimic noble gases, semiconductors, bone materials like calcium, or elements from pretty much any other region of the periodic table.
Page 342

Assuming that he would decipher DNA, Pauling had not broken much of a sweat on his calculations at first, and Ava lit into him: “If [DNA] was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder at it?” Even so, Linus loved her deeply, and perhaps one reason he stayed at Cal Tech so long and never transferred his allegiance to Berkeley, even though the latter was a much stronger school at the time, was that one of the more prominent members of the Berkeley faculty, Robert Oppenheimer, later head of the Manhattan Project, had tried to seduce Ava, which made Linus furious.
Page 358

Overall, the history of varying constants resembles the history of alchemy: even when there’s real science going on, it’s hard to sift it from the mysticism. Scientists tend to invoke inconstants to explain away whatever cosmological mysteries happen to trouble a particular era, such as the accelerating universe.
Page 373

Okay, I'm unsure why I picked up this book other than it is a classic, a book that I've peripherally known about for a long time, but had never read. It is THE anti-war book (not a pacifist's book, an anti-war book). Maybe Ryan Holiday had it on his monthly book recommendation list (that list being one I highly recommend for finding good books outside one's wheelhouse).

I am against war. I believe that modern wars are economically motivated, that they are a way for rich people to become richer, that they are about control over resources, and that they grind the poor far far more heavily than they affect the rich. I despise every form of violent action.

That said, I also believe there are circumstances where you need to say, "Enough." There are times when the aggression of others needs to be stopped, when non-violent or pacifist tactics no longer work, and violence is the pragmatic action. I am unsure when that point is. The Holocaust is clearly one such case.

So, starting from the standpoint that I am anti-war, but am pragmatic about human nature, I started reading this book. I was pretty much in agreement with the horrors of war and the arguments against war being made in the book, until around a hundred pages.

And then I became uncomfortable.

If they weren’t fighting for liberty they were fighting for independence or democracy or freedom or decency or honor or their native land or something else that didn’t mean anything.
Page 116

Those something-elses do have meaning, they do mean something.

But...

You keep your ideals just as long as they don’t cost me my life.
Page 118

This was where I was thinking, okay, yes, my ideals shouldn't cost another his life. If I'm unwilling to sacrifice for my ideals, doesn't make sense for ...

You can always hear the people who are willing to sacrifice somebody else’s life. They’re plenty loud and they talk all the time.
Page 119

... me to say yes to other people's kids dying.

War disproportionally affects and decimates the poor. The American War machine doesn't eat up the rich kids, it grinds the poor kids. Are the people authorizing the continued War in Afghanistan sending their own kids or grandkids to the front line? I'd wager not, and be quite surprised if I lost.

And I continued to disagree with the sentiment.

Because the guys who say life isn’t worth living without some principle so important you’re willing to die for it they are all nuts.
Page 120

I would trade democracy for life. I would trade independence and honor and freedom and decency for life. I will give you all these things and you give me the power to walk and see and hear and breathe the air and taste my food.
Page 122

And this is where I disagree with the author and the anti-war sentiment as portrayed in this book.

One could argue democracy in and of itself isn't worth dying for, and honor is a tool that those not interested in it wield against those who are or want to be (but the definitions can change enough that the manipulators of the tool benefit only themselves, which makes this a cautious, flimsy blade to die upon), but independence and freedom and decency, those are worth dying for.

The author writes,

He thought of the Carthaginian slaves down in the darkness blinded and chained and he thought they were lucky guys.
Page 190

and one presumes believes, based on his subsequent actions. Compared to someone with no arms, no legs, no mouth, no nose, no ears, and no eyes, yes, sure the ones blinded are luckier. I'm unsure their existence is better, though. The former can communicate, could potentially go home, feel the sun on his skin, the caress of a loved one, the ground under him. He could communicate via morse code, and eventually ask for his own release. The slaves, though, not at all.

I really disagree that a life lived as a slave with no personal sovereignty, no personal autonomy, is better than fighting against the oppressors.

The book is worth reading and worth pondering. I understand why it has stayed in print these many decades. It's a good book to start a discussion on where the boundaries are between pacifism and response.

She would play it clear through and his father in Shale City would be listening and thinking isn’t it wonderful I can sit here eight miles away and hold a little piece of black business to my ear and hear far off the music of Macia my beautiful my Macia.
Page 14

This book was written in 1939. The book it talks about is World War I. Phones were a new thing, and revolutionized society. We tend to forget the magic of these devices.

Then somebody else maybe six miles up or down the line would break into the conversation without being ashamed at all.
Page 14

I remembered party lines from the barest edges of memory. They were cheaper than private lines. You could pick up the phone and listen in to any conversation currently happening on the line. It was fascinating stuff, in a voyeuristic way.

Mr. Hargraves who was superintendent of schools made a speech before the flight. He told about how the invention of the airplane was the greatest step forward man had made in a hundred years. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves would cut down the distance between nations and peoples. The airplane would be a great instrument in making people understand one another in making people love one another. The airplane said Mr. Hargraves was ushering in a new era of peace and prosperity and mutual understanding. Everyone would be friends said Mr. Hargraves when the airplane knitted the world together so that the people of the world understood each other.
Page 20

Well that didn't work out, did it?

Sometimes you didn’t have enough money to go to the dance so you would drive lazily by the fair grounds and hear the music coming through the night from the pavilion. The songs all had meaning and the words were very serious. You felt all swelled up inside and you wished you were over there at the pavilion. You wondered who your girl was dancing with. Then you would light a cigarette and talk about something else.
Page 23

So, cruising. That still exists.

Well, did until the internet came along and everyone under the age of 22 plays games on the internet all day.

But the entry of Roumania into the war occurred on the same day the Los Angeles newspapers carried a story of two young Canadian soldiers who had been crucified by the Germans in full view of their comrades across Nomansland. That made the Germans nothing better than animals and naturally you got interested and wanted Germany to get the tar kicked out of her.
Page 24

He was fighting too hard and he knew it. A man can’t fight always. If he’s drowning or suffocating he’s got to be smart and hold back some of his strength for the last the final the death struggle.
Page 26

Kareen looked up at old Mike unafraid. “He’s going away in the morning.”

“I know. I know girl. Get into the bedroom. Both of you. Maybe you never get another chance. Go on K’reen.”
Page 31

War does funny things.

What a goddam shame it is to drown when if you could only stand up and stretch your hand above your head you might touch a willow branch trailing in the water like the hair of a girl like Kareen’s hair.
Page 59

He thought well kid you’re deaf as a post but there isn’t the pain. You’ve got no arms but you don’t hurt. You’ll never burn your hand or cut your finger or smash a nail you lucky stiff. You’re alive and you don’t hurt and that’s much better than being alive and hurting.
Page 60

Never again to wiggle your toes. What a hell of a thing what a wonderful beautiful thing to wiggle your toes.
Page 61

He knew now that he was surely dying but he was curious. He didn’t want to die until he had found out everything.
Page 62

You couldn’t lose that much of yourself and still keep on living.
Page 63

He had no legs and no arms and no eyes and no ears and no nose and no mouth and no tongue. What a hell of a dream. It must be a dream. Of course sweet god it’s a dream. He’d have to wake up or he’d go nuts. Nobody could live like that. A person in that condition would be dead and he wasn’t dead so he wasn’t in that condition. Just dreaming.
Page 64

He could want it to be a dream forever and that wouldn’t change things. Because he was alive alive.
Page 64

They always sent to the Midnight Mission for an extra man to work with the crew on Friday nights. The guys from the Mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed. They knew that anyone who smelled the disinfectant knew they were bums on charity. They didn’t like that and how could you blame them? They were always humble and when they were bright enough they worked hard. Some of them weren’t bright. Some of them couldn’t even read the orders on the bins.
Page 67

And yet, there was a chance at finding a job.

He said he had come to California to go into the movies. No he didn’t want to be an actor. But there should be many jobs for a young man like himself with ambition in a business as great as the movies. He said that he thought he might like to work in the research department at one of the studios.
Page 69

I love this idea, of going to Hollywood to work in a research department.

It was like a full grown man suddenly being stuffed back into his mother’s body. He was lying in stillness. He was completely helpless.
Page 83

He would never again be able to see the faces of people who made you glad just to look at them of people like Kareen.
Page 84

Now that he understood the purpose and mechanics of the mask the scab became an irritation instead of merely a curious thing. Even when he was a kid he could never let a scab quite heal over. He was always picking at it. Now he was picking at this scab by tossing his head and drawing the mask tight.
Page 90

Yeah, I understand that better than I should.

Jim had been put in a ward where there were a lot of guys who had holes here and there that wouldn’t heal. Some of them had been lying there draining and stinking for months. The smell of that ward when you hit it was like the smell of a corpse you stumble over on patrol duty like the smell of a rich ripe corpse that falls open at the touch of a boot and sends up a stench of dead flesh like a cloud of gas.
Page 93

For example when he was a kid he used to day dream. He used to sit back and think of things he’d do some day. Or he used to think of things he did last week. But all the time he would be awake.
Page 101

He had a great hedge of sunflowers around it. The sunflower hearts were sometimes a foot across. The seeds made fine food for the chickens.
Page 107

A big sunflower, with a foot diameter of seeds? Yeah, fine food for rats, too.

By the end of the season the cellar was packed. You would go down there and beside the great crocks of water-glassed eggs there would be mason jars of every kind of fruit you could want. There would be apricot preserves and orange marmalade and raspberry jam and blueberry jam and apple jelly. There would be hard-boiled eggs canned in beet juice and bread and butter pickles and salted cherries and chili sauce. If you went down in October you would find three or four heavy fruit cakes black and moist and filled with citron and nuts. They would be in the coolest corner of the cellar and they would be carefully wrapped with damp cloths against the Christmas season.

All of these things they had and yet his father was a failure. His father couldn’t make any money.
Page 109

One could argue his dad was wealthier than most, and yet...

They couldn’t get meat as well cured. No amount of money could buy that. Those things you had to raise for yourself. His father had managed to do it even to the honey they used on the hot biscuits his mother made. His father had managed to produce all these things on two city lots and yet his father was a failure.
Page 110

And yet, he should have been failure, and labelled a success.

There are plenty of laws to protect guys’ money even in war time but there’s nothing on the books says a man’s life’s his own.
Page 114

What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? It’s just a word like house or table or any other word. Only it’s a special kind of word. A guy says house and he can point to a house to prove it. But a guy says come on let’s fight for liberty and he can’t show you liberty.
Page 114

If there could be a next time and somebody said let’s fight for liberty he would say mister my life is important. I’m not a fool and when I swap my life for liberty I’ve got to know in advance what liberty is and whose idea of liberty we’re talking about and just how much of that liberty we’re going to have.
Page 115

Hell’s fire guys had always been fighting for liberty. America fought a way for liberty in 1776. Lots of guys died. And in the end does America have any more liberty than Canada or Australia who didn’t fight at all?
Page 115

See, this is one of those lines that I disagree with. Canada and Australia have the liberties it does because America fought.

Would they have managed their liberty without fighting? Could you argue that England was going to fold in upon itself and just let those colonies have their own sovernty? Sure, you could. I'm not sure how much data you'd have to back it up, though. People view loss as much worse than a gain is good. Pretty sure more liberty has been gained by force over waiting for the good will of the oppressors.

A guy can think of being dead a hundred years from now and he doesn’t mind it. But to think of being dead tomorrow morning and to be dead forever to be nothing but dust and stink in the earth is that liberty?
Page 115

They were always fighting for something the bastards and if anyone dared say the hell with fighting it’s all the same each war is like the other and nobody gets any good out of it why they hollered coward.
Page 116

Yep. Propoganda and how to influence people by triggering shame.

Then there was this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for.
Page 116

You’re being noble and after you’re killed the thing you traded your life for won’t do you any good and chances are it won’t do anybody else any good either.
Page 118

There are lots of idealists around who will say have we got so low that nothing is more precious than life? Surely there are ideals worth fighting for even dying for.
Page 118

And they say but surely life isn’t as important as principle. Then you say oh no? Maybe not yours but mine is. What the hell is principle? Name it and you can have it.
Page 118

They sound wonderful. Death before dishonor. This ground sanctified by blood. These men who died so gloriously. They shall not have died in vain. Our noble dead. Hmmmm. But what do the dead say?
Page 119

Nobody but the dead know whether all these things people talk about are worth dying for or not. And the dead can’t talk. So the words about noble deaths and sacred blood and honor and such are all put into dead lips by grave robbers and fakes who have no right to speak for the dead.
Page 119

And all the guys who died all the five million or seven million or ten million who went out and died to make the world safe for democracy to make the world safe for words without meaning how did they feel about it just before they died?
Page 121

He could tell them mister there’s nothing worth dying for I know because I’m dead.
Page 122

You’re worth nothing dead except for speeches.
Page 124

If they say coward why don’t pay any attention because it’s your job to live not to die. If they talk about dying for principles that are bigger than life you say mister you’re a liar. Nothing is bigger than life. There’s nothing noble in death.
Page 124

Because when you’re dead mister it’s all over. It’s the end.
Page 124

Half a league half a league half a league onward. Into the valley of death rode the six hundred. Noble six hundred. Theirs not to reason why theirs but to do or die.
Page 128

There are eight planets. They are Earth Venus Jupiter Mars Mercury. One two three four five. Three more. He didn’t know.
Page 128

This cracked me up. Sure, there are now eight. Between then and now, there were nine.

FTR: Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune [Pluto]

Hell the trouble with him was he didn’t know anything. He didn’t know a thing. Why hadn’t they taught him something he could remember? Why didn’t he have something to think about?
Page 129

It wasn’t that he had forgotten how to remember. It was just that he’d never paid any attention so he had nothing worth remembering.
Page 129

But where would she be — the real Kareen — the Kareen out in the world out in time? While he slept with the nineteen year old Kareen every night was the real Kareen with somebody else a woman now perhaps with a baby?
Page 150

It seemed that an American any American was a friend compared to any Englishman or Frenchman. That was because he was an American himself America was his home he had been born there and anyone outside was a stranger.
Page 150

Even though he could do nothing but lie in blackness it would be better if the blackness were the blackness of home and if the people who moved in the blackness were his own people his own American people.
Page 151

He’d never had any particular ideas about Amerca. He’d never been very patriotic. It was something you took without even thinking.
Page 152

It never seemed to occur to her that there was a mind an intelligence working behind the rhythm of his head against the pillow. She was simply watching over an incurably sick patient trying to make his sickness as comfortable as possible.
Page 173

But that was all talk because they were really very young guys and Ruby was the first and only girl they knew they were too shy with other girls with nice girls. They soon grew ashamed of Ruby and when they went down they would always feel a little dirty and a little disgusted. They came away blaming Ruby somehow for making them feel that way.
Page 175

He got to thinking of all the prisoners he had ever read about or heard about all the little guys from the beginning of the doing of things who had been caught and imprisoned and who had died without ever becoming free again. He thought of the slaves little guys like himself who had been captured in war who had spent the rest of their lives chained like animals to oars rowing some big guy’s ship through the Mediterranean sea. He thought of them down there in the deeps of the ship never knowing where they were going never smelling the outer air never feeling anything except the oar in their hands and the shackles on their legs and the whip that lashed their backs when they grew tired.
Page 189

He thought of them and he thought they were luckier than I am they could move they could see each other they were more nearly living than I and they were not imprisoned as securely.
Page 190

They were in agony but they died soon and even in their agony they could stand on two legs they could pull against their chains.
Page 190

He too had been forced to fight against other slaves of his own kind in a strange place.
Page 191

He knew now that he had never been really happy in his whole life. There had been times when he had thought he was happy but none of them were like this.
Page 223

We are men of peace we are men who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace if you take away our work if you try to range us one against the other we will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for democracy we will take you seriously and by god and by Christ we will make it so.
Page 250

Put the guns into our hands and we will use them. Give us the slogans and we will turn them into realities.
Page 252

We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquillity in security in decency in peace.
Page 252

OMG wow this book.

I don't know what I was expecting from this book, and I don't know how it ended up on my reading list, but the book was impressively well done. I enjoyed it.

Basic premise is an author, Jerry Grey, has Alzheimers and is confusing his plots with reality. Most of his books have brutal murders of women in them. Given his dementia, his confessions to the police are met with skepticism.

Except Cleave has this great, underlying, no-one-talk-about it something going along under the plot. Everyone dances around something that happened in the past. Eventually we find out what it was (or figure it out before the reveal), but the plot twists don't stop.

While the ending was a realistic one, "the only one that could have happened," I still wanted to scream "noooooo!" and throw the book, a good sign that I was invested in the story.

Mom agrees with this one being goooood. Strongly recommended.

Every author eventually has a last book—you just didn’t think you were there yet, and you didn’t think it would be a journal.
Page 11

You got the amazing wife, a woman who can put her hand in yours and make you feel whatever it is you need to feel, whether it’s comfort or warmth or excitement or lust, the woman who you wake up to every morning knowing you get to fall asleep with her that night, the woman who can always see the other side of the argument, the woman who teaches you more about life every day.
Page 12

A woman’s body was found an hour ago, and like always when Jerry hears these type of reports it makes him sad to be a human being.
Page 25

“I have dementia."

"The dementia has an awful way of rewriting your past, Jerry. It’s making the stories from your novels feel like real life to you."
Page 61

Other people get sick, and other people die at much younger ages, but this is you me us we. You’re allowed to be upset for yourself—that’s your right, and you have to admit you’re a little angry at Sandra for getting rid of the one thing that can bring you comfort when nothing else can.
Page 63

Bad news — last night you took a leak in one of the bedrooms. You were halfway through when you suddenly realized you were pissing in the corner of the guest bedroom rather than the bathroom.
Page 96

Dementia or drunk, sometimes the same result.

Jerry doesn’t answer him. There’s nothing you can say to somebody who already has their mind made up.
Page 99

He remembers that — it was a question journalists always used to throw his way. So you’re fascinated by crime. No, he’s not — he likes crime writing, but not crime, and how many times has he pointed out the two are very different animals? It’s like thinking people who watch war movies must love war.
Page 100

He hates malls. Yet he’s always thought that if you took the malls away, society would fall apart.
Page 170

“I can’t make the same mistake again, Jerry. I’m sorry, but I have to take you to the police. We have to let them figure out what’s going on, and most of all we have to make sure you can never hurt anybody else again."
Page 180

"It’s not your fault," Hans says. “None of it is. It’s this damn disease. You’re not the same guy any of us used to know."
Page 189

... and the human race, well now, they sure do love a good show, don’t they? Especially when it’s at the cost of somebody else.
Page 196

As the father of the bride, having been where you’re sitting now twenty-five years ago, it reminds me of what my own dad said to me back then, a piece of advice I wish I had taken. He said, Jerry, run! Laughter. Genuine laughter, especially from the older folks in the crowd who all can relate to what Jerry is saying.
Page 198

But seriously, folks, as any parent will do when they’re seeing their child getting married, you think back to when it was your own time, you think back and you wonder how the years have gone by so quickly, there are always ups and downs in a relationship, and the older you are the more you’ve been through, and the more you’ve been through the more advice you can give. Of course everybody has advice, a lot of us say My advice is don’t take anybody’s advice, make your own way, and thankfully, folks, that’s not the chestnut of wisdom I’m here to impart.
Page 198

“Jerry... there’s something you need to know." He breaks out in a cold sweat and almost drops the phone. Nothing good ever comes after those words.
Page 227

People say suicide is a selfish act. They say it’s cowardly. People say these things because they don’t understand. It’s actually the opposite. It’s not cowardly, in fact it takes incredible courage. To stare Death in the face and tell him you’re ready... that’s a brave thing.
Page 232

Eva was crying on the phone, and Sandra was too, and even you cried, J-Man.
Page 233

He can remember the way the sun fell into the room, the angle fractionally different every day, the way it would hit and fade the framed King Kong Escapes poster on the wall. Only he wouldn’t see it fade, it faded the same way you don’t notice a child growing every day, but you know it’s happening.
Page 236

How many times has Sandra told them to shut up when they’ve been at the movies, or watching something on TV, because they were unable to stop sharing their predictions?
Page 237

It me.

Jerry nods. “Sometimes people say my books are implausible. I remember that." Hans shrugs. “Most crime novels are. If they weren’t, then they’d be no different from real life. People don’t want to read about real life." “This is real life."
Page 238

“People never go to the police," Hans says. “They should, but they never do, because if they did then that would be the end of the story, right? It would be wrapped up by chapter three."
Page 238

"Do you have a warrant?"

“This isn’t a joking matter," one of them says.

“I’m not joking. I’m telling you he isn’t here, and you’re standing on my property calling me a liar and asking if I mind having my rights violated."
Page 245

There is a world of difference, Jerry thinks, between making shit up and making shit happen.
Page 266

How much money does the man pump into war, and tourism, and sport, compared to Alzheimer’s research?
Page 288

That was the life of a writer — keep writing, keep moving forward, stay ahead of the crowd because if you don’t get that story written down then somebody else would.
Page 302

However, he has once committed what I’ve always thought of as the cardinal sin, and that’s to ask Where do you get your ideas?, as if I order a box online every year and have an assistant weed out the bad ones.
Page 304