Book Reviews – June 2018

It’s been a light couple of months of reading for me for some reason. Maybe because I’m bad at life?

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life by Walter Isaacson

Benjamin Franklin is my sauce, my jam, my condiment of choice. I love the way he thinks and how he approached his life and I want to have dinner with him and pick his brain. He’d invite me to join his cabal and we’d hang out on the regular. We’d accidentally touch hands one day and feel sparks that inspire his interest in electricity.

I want to emulate him. He was always trying to get better. He didn’t chase wealth and he valued practicality. His beliefs evolved with thoughtfulness. He was a writer and he kept a version of my beloved resolutions chart. What’s not to love?

Maybe his philandering. I didn’t love that.

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Amazon gave me, for some reason, a $4.58 credit and then sent me an email telling me they were going to take away this credit unless I used it that day. So I bought this book because it was on my recommended books list and cost $4.68. Net cost $0.10.

The author is basically giving you a pep-talk on creating. Creators create and don’t make excuses. They don’t let Resistance defeat them. Resistance is everything that is not creating.

The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.

A good, quick encouragement of a read. Worth $0.10.

The Luck Factor by Richard Wiseman

I want to marry this author and acquire his last name. Anita Wiseman. Oh, hmmm. I would probably get tired of people making some version of the I need a wise man joke. Never mind, I’m keeping my last name.

Anyway, his book is good and has been my go-to topic of conversation. In it, he gives a rigorous, scientific, psychological approach to luck. The author used four principles to explain how one goes about becoming a luckier person. One principle is grit. Lucky people are grittier. Another principle is your attitude – feeling lucky. Create a lucky narrative for yourself.

Those two principles I think about a lot and have a fairly good handle on.

The third principle is trusting your intuition. Be mindful, in the world, and trust yourself. The fourth principle is maximizing your chance opportunities. He gives specific traits you can foster to become more lucky. Be more extroverted, more open and less neurotic.

I’m introverted and neurotic, so I found some things to work on here.

The way lucky people “think and behave makes them far more likely than others to create, notice and act upon chance opportunities in their lives.” It’s seizing possibility and creating as many chances as you can. I’m trying to change the way I think and behave, specifically experimenting with altering my body language to grow luckier. More to come.

On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser

This book gives some excellent advice on the craft of writing. The author goes over the technical side of things and gives you advice on prose and style and unity and theme and all that garbage. Interesting and vital, but also kind of rote and not that interesting if I’m being honest. I enjoyed Steven King’s book on writing more.

Here’s a quote that resonated with me though:

“Living is the trick. Writers who write interestingly tend to be men and women who keep themselves interested. That’s almost the whole point of becoming a writer. I’ve used writing to give myself an interesting life and a continuing education. If you write about subjects you think you would enjoy knowing about, your enjoyment will show in what you write. Learning is a tonic.”

If I can’t explain to myself in words, I don’t understand it. I learn about things and then try to write about it to make sure I get it. I experience life so I have something to write about and understand later. 🙂

The author would not approve of my smiley emoticon in my last paragraph.

Killers of the Flower Moon The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

I hate being reminded of how shitty some people are, how much evil exists out there. There was no great heyday in America’s past. We’ve always been kind of jerks to Others. We’ve shafted Native Americans since we met them.

The Osage tribe is an excellent example. Back in the 1920s, they lived in Oklahoma and negotiated mineral rights for the land we pushed them onto. The oil beneath the land made the tribe very rich. A bunch of white people exploited this fact, including people in the government. We forced them to have guardians to oversee how they spend their money. Of course many of those guardians stole from the Osage.

There’s more evil though. This book details the shocking story of the murders of several Osage, a plot to profit from the oil leases. Dozens of people killed and nobody cares at first because killing Native Americans is not as bad as killing a white person.

The newly formed FBI comes in and ties a neat little bow on perhaps the most egregious of the offenders. But the author recounts several more suspicious deaths of Osage people that were never tried or investigated because nobody with power wants to bother. Institutional racism.

History is a merciless judge. It lays bare our tragic blunders and foolish missteps and exposes our most intimate secrets, wielding the power of hindsight like an arrogant detective who seems to know the end of the mystery from the outset.