Author: Taryn

“You are not so singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live, the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know. . . . Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. This is enough.”

I have always loved the preceding John Adams quote, written in a letter to his granddaughter Caroline. I struggle with feeling that I know less as time goes on, especially when it seems that most everyone around me is so certain about everything! Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing by Jamie Holmes appealed to me because of its premise: it is not about what you know, but how you handle what you don’t know.

This book is surprisingly short! It ends on page 232 (72%) and the remainder of the pages are endnotes. Nonsense deals exclusively with the topics of ambiguity and uncertainty. It has a similar feel to books by Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point), Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational) and Steven Levitt/Stephen J. Dubner (Freakonomics), in that it uses case studies and experiments from a wide variety of fields to justify its thesis. Throughout the book, the author provides possible solutions to counteract our intrinsic need to avoid ambiguity.

Let’s say for example, you see a white crow. At first you’re a little surprised. You peer at the bird with heightened attention, and then eventually you switch into the more domineering mind state that making decisions requires. You can assimilate the experience and decide the bird is a dove. Or you can accommodate it and recognize that albino crows exist. The rub, as Proulx’s collaborator Steve Heine told me, is that “assimilation is so often incomplete.” We act as if we’re sure the bird is a dove, but the feeling that it’s not is still there in the unconscious, leaving us trapped in a similar middle ground as the doomsday believers were, stuck between assuming we’ve understood and sensing we haven’t. One way we respond to these lingering anxieties is by finding comfort in our social groups and passionately emphasizing our ideals. Proulx and Inzlicht called this reaction affirmation. Affirmation is the intensification of beliefs, whatever those beliefs might be, in response to a perceived threat.

The book is divided three parts The first part is about how the human brain responds to uncertainty. This section was really interesting because of the experiments showing that humans automatically seek order after being exposed to randomness, even when they are not consciously aware of the exposure. Not only did the test subjects find patterns more effectively after seeing incorrectly colored playing cards, their political positions intensified.

When the world is less predictable, people are more likely to jump to conclusions or entrench their existing views. That’s the problem with striving for certainty or making rashly informed judgments of trust to escape from ambiguity. Urgently fixating on certainty is our defense mechanism against the unknown and unstable. However, what we need in turbulent times is adaptability and calculated reevaluation.

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“Openness to outside influences and the frequency of travel abroad, he found, was correlated with simultaneous gains in achievements in business and religion. Most strikingly, he also discovered that the more diversity there was in Japanese society, the more creative the society was two generations later in the areas of medicine, fiction, poetry, and painting. Diversity can be painful initially, it seems, but it pays off decades later. While at first most immigrants occupy a marginal position in society, as Simonton explained, “after a generation or two not only do they become integrated but their culture becomes part of the ‘melting pot’—as we start eating pizza or chow mein.”

Part 3 highlights how embracing ambiguity can be asset. My main takeaways from this chapter were that it is important to investigate your successes as well as your failures and that deconstructing objects to their most form can lead to great ingenuity.

Nonsense is definitely relevant to today’s world. The need to reconcile ambiguity is probably one of the driving forces behind the growing divisiveness in the United States, which seems to get more heightened as the 24-hour news cycle and the internet makes the world feel more chaotic. On a lighter note, it also might explain the intense emotions during the white/gold or blue/black dress debacle! Like any book of this nature, it is not a complete picture and it relies heavily on anecdotes. However, it does provide yet another lens with which to see the world and makes one much more comfortable with the concept of uncertainty. It made me view the contentious arguments that erupt on social media in a different light and has made me more reflective over my own knee-jerk reactions. It is a fun and quick read and I think it would be a useful book for everyone to read.

For Chekhov, morality lay not in our relationships with what we know, but how admirably we deal with what we don’t…It’s a morality distinct from IQ and common notions of confidence or self-control. Chekhov showed that not knowing doesn’t leave us without a compass, in some relativist nether land. Owning our uncertainty makes us kinder, more creative, and more alive…”It is time for writers to admit that nothing in this world makes sense,” [Anton Chekhov] once wrote. “Only fools and charlatans think they know and understand everything . . . and if an artist decides to declare that he understands nothing of what he sees—this in itself constitutes a considerable clarity in the realm of thought, and a great step forward.”

Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice is an enlightening and well-structured book about the ways in which the current US criminal justice system fails us. Adam Benforado, an associate professor law and a former attorney, focuses on how our hidden biases affect the justice system. He explains the problems in each part of the legal process and offers possible solutions.

In fact, we are not such cool and deliberate detectives; rather, we are masters at jumping to conclusions based on an extremely limited amount of evidence. The automatic processes in our brain (commonly referred to as System 1) quickly take in the scene and then reach a conclusion about the victim based on what is right in front of us, without considering what we might be missing. Ambiguity and doubt are pushed to the side.

In certain circumstances, our deliberative and effortful mental processes (System 2) can override those initial impressions–and raise the specter of uncertainty–but often, they do not. The less we know, the easier it is for us to produce a coherent story, and it is the consistency of the narrative that predicts how much confidence we will have in our assessment. The unfortunate result is that we may become overconfident precisely when we have limited or weak evidence.

The book opens with an example of medieval justice. Benforado suggests that just as we laugh at the irrationality of our ancestor’s legal methods, our descendants will be shocked at the naiveté behind our modern day legal processes. The author walks the reader through each part of of the legal process, explains the current problems, and suggests solutions. Some of the solutions are surprisingly simple to implement, e.g. data collection on judicial decisions to show hidden biases. The book is extremely well-organized. Here is the table of contents:

Part 1: Investigation
1. The Labels We Live By – The Victim
2. Dangerous Confessions – The Detective
3. The Criminal Mind – The Suspect

Part II: Adjudication
4. Breaking the Rules – The Lawyer
5. The Eye of the Beholder – The Jury
6. The Corruption of Memory – The Eyewitness
7. How to Tell a Lie – The Eyewitness
8. Umpires or Activists? – The Judge

Part III: Punishment
9. An Eye for an Eye – The Public
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Part IV: Reform
11. What We Must Overcome – The Challenge
12. What We Can Do – The Future
Bibliography. Endnotes are available at the author’s website.

The cases and experiments mentioned were fascinating. Some aspects this book reminded me of Predictably Irrational and Freakonomics series, but Unfair is deeper, more focused and more academic. Some of the interesting topics discussed: how disgust makes people’s moral judgments significantly more severe, how women labeled as virgins or married are viewed as more responsible for sexual assault than when labeled as a divorcée, how we are all still closet physiognomists, how the act of holding a gun biases the gun holder’s assessment of threat, how camera position during arrests and interrogations can sway the verdict, the impact of race on the severity of punishment, the impact of facial features on the severity of punishment (“in cases where the victim is white, the more stereotypically black a defendant’s facial features, the more likely he is to receive the death penalty”), how a terrorist attack can impact unrelated cases, how the time of day can affect punishment, how a video of brutality shown in slow-motion can alter juror perception of an event, and how judges aren’t quite as objective as they would like to believe.

Research suggests that once we have summed someone up, we search for data confining that identity and disregard or minimize evidence conflicting with it. Of course, it doesn’t feel that way. It feels as though we are just dispassionately sorting through the details. But really our minds are bending the facts, sawing off inconvenient corners, and tossing away contradictory information so that everything can be fit into our ready-made boxes.

Some of my key takeaways from this book:
(1) We all have hidden biases that we are not consciously aware of; police officers, judges and lawyers are not immune to these hidden biases. Most people aren’t actively trying to be unfair.
(2) It is surprisingly easy to rationalize unethical behavior.
(3) We tend to see our motivations as purer than they actually are (seeking justice vs. seeking vengeance).
(4) Some aspects of punishment are counterintuitive to the results expected, e.g excessively long solitary confinements.

This is not a quick and easy read, but it is really interesting and enlightening. I would recommend this to book to everyone, especially voters in the United States and people who are interested in the intricacies of the human mind and its inherent biases. There is a bit of a liberal bent in parts of the book which might deter some from reading it, but I don’t think you have to be comfortable with 100% of Benforado’s proposed solutions in order to find value in this book. In addition to this book, I would also recommend Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing because of overlapping themes (blind certainty and cognitive dissonance).

Doubt isn’t the enemy of blind justice–blind certainty is.

“Life, like the sea, comes at us hard,” he could hear Old Pa saying. “It’s kindness–simple human kindness—that buffers the blows.”

A family drama set in central Florida, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Wes Avery is a successful gas station owner and dutiful family man. His once meticulous wife Sarah is slowly pulling away from the family, as she increasingly retreats to the family bomb shelter. His 17-year-old daughter Charlotte is nervous about the looming threat of nuclear war, but is also preoccupied with high school and upcoming homecoming activities. As the tension builds between Russia and the United States, so does the tension in the Avery household.

Contemplating the global game played out over the past week, Avery had the dizzying realization that they’d reached every chess player’s worst nightmare: zugzwang.

Zugzwang, the endgame perfected by Persian chess masters over a thousand years ago, occurred when every move left is “bad” and whichever player has the next move will, as a result of his move, lose.

In the thermonuclear-charged game between Khrushchev and Kennedy, having reached zugzwang, the only question left to answer was: Whose turn is it? Was it Kennedy’s due to Khrushchev’s downing of the U-2? Or was it Khrushchev’s because of some secret move on Kennedy’s part?

This novel felt like two different books: a family drama and non-fiction novel. The non-fiction sections were actually my favorite parts! At the end of each school year, we would always stall out over World War II and then maybe devote the last couple days to everything that happened more recently. I really only knew the basics about the Cuban Missile Crisis. I learned a lot from this book (Pedro Pans, dog tags, women’s civil defense effort., etc.), especially about the civilian response. The author obviously did a lot of research. The most fascinating part of this book was the setting: Central Florida in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis. With the main character managing a successful gas station and the location set near an army base, the author is able to explore the escalating tension from an interesting, impactful angle. The author did a good job of portraying the fear and uncertainty the families experienced, as well as the innocence off the time, and the subsequent loss of innocence. I liked that the author chose to tell the story from the perspective of those who are helplessly watching the situation unfold through rumor and television report.
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He could see in her eyes the struggle between her need and her reluctance to believe him. In kindergarten, she’d nicknamed him Happy Pappy, discerning even at the age of five, his determined optimism. Her childhood drawings of him were always smiling. But clearly the problems they were facing today were so much larger, and scarier, than he had the power to resolve. That realization–her recognition that all the positive thinking in the world couldn’t mask the fact that he was as powerless as she was– pained him to no end.

I wasn’t too emotionally invested with the Avery family and their domestic situation. The characters never felt like fully formed people and I didn’t really care much about them or their relationships to each other. It seemed as if the author’s voice was speaking through them and the characters were simply vehicles through which to explore this fascinating time period in history. Avery and his gas station employees, Steve and Emilio, were the most interesting characters. Avery’s POV dominated most of the book, so maybe it would helped if there were more chapters from Sarah’s and Charlotte’s point of view. I did not like the way the last chapter was set up. I thought there would be more symmetry with the intro, so [spoiler] the letter to the actual author[/spoiler] threw me off and really took me out of the book.

Whenever Mama did that, she’d quote President Roosevelt: “When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hold on.” …But knots–she sighed deeply, hurting as she thought of it–like families, like dreams, like life, for that matter, can be slippery things, unwilling or unable to hold.

While I felt kind of ‘meh’ about the Avery family, I was very invested in the crisis unfolding around them. That is no small feat, considering I already knew the basics of how that situation ended up! The historical aspects of A Place We Knew Well were really interesting. I will be seeking out more books about this time period.

(Being from Southeast Texas, there was a one sentence reference to Port Arthur in Chapter 8 which was neat to read!)

“This thing’s got disaster written all over it,” Sarah had said. He wished she were here now to see them. Those kids aren’t the disaster, he would’ve told her. We are; every one of us who saw this thing coming and didn’t do everything in our power to stop it.

One story my grandfather told me about his days as a sandhog had seemed a tall tale, even to a kid, but later I’d found out it was true. In the years before electricity, what light burned inside the underwater caissons came from candles. At the greatest depths, the pressure was such that the candles wouldn’t blow out. The flame would sail off the wick, ricochet around the metal, then resettle on the wick. What my grandfather hadn’t told me was that sometimes cables broke and a man would be trapped down there. He’d know the candle was burning up oxygen, and he’d know the flame would not go out, but he’d keep blowing anyway, even with his last breaths, still hoping against hope that, somehow, it might. (Les)

I received this uncorrected proof as part of Powell’s Indiespensable box this quarter. The story alternates between the perspectives of Les, a retiring sheriff, and his on-and-off-again lady friend Becky, a park superintendent with a dark past. Les has a few loose ends to tie up in the last couple of weeks before his retirement. The mystery of a poisoned trout stream is the case that dominates most of his remaining time. It is a complicated case for Les because the main suspect is Gerald, an elderly man with whom Becky has a deep bond.

This is a quiet, slow-moving novel, that suddenly picks up the pace in the second half. The first part of the book is more of a character story, but it becomes a standard whodunit halfway through when the river is poisoned. I greatly preferred Les’s chapters over Becky’s. Most of her chapters are poetic nature descriptions or flashbacks into her traumatic past. I never really felt like I got a full grasp of her character. The character background stories (Becky with the school shooting and ecoterrorist ex-boyfriend and Les’s depressed ex-wife) were threads that weren’t completely weaved in and it left me wanting more or even less. I know that the ecoterrorist boyfriend was meant to make the reader and Les doubt Becky as a great judge of character, but I didn’t fully get the school shooting connection. It explained her eccentricities, but her strangeness wasn’t really integral to the story.

I didn’t fully grasp the deep connection between Gerald and Becky. I think he may have reminded her of her grandparents, which made her feel a sense of duty towards him. I don’t think it was really fully explored or connected. We only see Gerald through the eyes of Les and Becky, but I think he was really well-drawn as as strong, stoic man who has watched the world leave him behind.

“That gun was aimed at you a full minute,” Jarvis told me later. Your life flashes before you, I’ve always heard, but it hadn’t for me. It was as if I stood in the corner, not so much observing as performing a methodical self-autopsy, not of my body but of my life. I had not been frightened. Instead, I’d felt a calm clarity. Everything inside me, including my heart, seemed suspended, except one thought. What will you miss? A full minute and I’d had no answer. Then the gun was lowered, and I slowly, reluctantly, came back into myself. (Les)

Prevention viagra generic wholesale here is better than cure, and it’s better to look out for certain warning signs in order to decide the necessary procedures to shape a medical course of action. These complaints comprise: o low sperm count, which involves very few or no sperm presence in semen o low sperm motility, i.e. sperm that doesn acquisition de viagra t run as it has to be o abnormality of the sperm cells that are under lessons. Neo40 utilises the many levitra properien health benefits that have been mentioned below. Vardenafil is contraindicated in men for whom sexual intercourse is inadvisable due to cardiovascular risk factors o Severe liver damage o Severe impairment in renal function o Low blood pressure o Recent stroke or heart assault Hereditary degenerative retinal issue Regular symptoms incorporate wheezing, migraine, flushing, dyspepsia, delayed erections, palpitations and photophobia. viagra wholesale uk Les is a conflicted, flawed person and I felt that he was more well-developed than Becky. Les’s main motivation is to set things right before his retirement and to finally be able to answer the question “In the very core of my being, who am I?” in a satisfactory way.

Like the pot bribes, Jarvis was letting me know things would be different with him in charge. That was a good thing, but he would learn in time that a sheriff could bend the law for no other reason than what was law and what was right sometimes differed. (Les)

The writing itself is very lovely to read. I think it is a credit to the author that I didn’t think “Wait, what is this even about?”, until I suddenly noticed half of the pages were in my left hand! I really liked the bleak setting and Ron Rash is truly a master at creating the atmosphere of Appalachia. I liked the contrast of the ugliness of man against the serene beauty of nature. The parts about methheads and the river poisoning were the strongest parts for me. The mystery elements were tied up in a satisfying way.

I loved the writing and the setting, so I would definitely read another book by this author! I did like this one, it just isn’t one of my favorites.

Above me that night tiny lights brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed. Photinus carolinus. Fireflies synchronized to make a single meadow-wide flash, then all dark between. Like being inside the earth’s pulsing heart. I’d slowed my blood-beat to that rhythm. So much in the world that night. (Becky)

Blind, that’s what I am. I never opened my eyes. I never thought to look into people’s hearts, I looked only in their faces. Stone blind . . . Mr. Stone. Mr. Stone set a watchman in church yesterday. He should have provided me with one. I need a watchman to lead me around and declare what he seeth every hour on the hour. I need a watchman to tell me this is what a man says but this is what he means, to draw a line down the middle and say here is this justice and there is that justice and make me understand the difference. I need a watchman to go forth and proclaim to them all that twenty-six years is too long to play a joke on anybody, no matter how funny it is.

I am really nostalgic about To Kill a Mockingbird, because it was one of the first books that made me think about issues larger than myself. I was really interested when I heard about this early draft being published, but I started to approach it with more unease as more information came out [spoiler](i.e. Jem’s death, Atticus’s racism, odd publishing circumstances).[spoiler]

Twenty-six year old Jean Louise Finch (Scout) returns to Maycomb, Alabama for her annual trip home. A few days into her trip, she discovers a racist pamphlet mixed in with her dad’s belongings and finds him and her devoted suitor Henry Clinton attending a meeting where a man is giving a vitriolic racist speech. She also sees many other men she respected there and quickly realizes that her home is not the idyllic town she remembers from childhood. Jean Louise is physically ill at the thought of her father having bigoted views and struggles to reconcile the idealized version of the father with the man he is today.

It is easy to see why the publisher suggested that Harper Lee rewrite the book to focus on Scout’s childhood. Some of my favorite sections of GSAW were the flashbacks that showcase Scout’s relationships with Atticus, Jem and Calpurnia. Dill even makes a brief flashback appearance! The flashbacks sometimes ran a little too long, but it is nice to read about the Scout’s childhood again.

She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father. She never questioned it, never thought about it, never even realized that before she made any decision of importance the reflex, “What would Atticus do?” passed through her unconscious; she never realized what made her dig in her feet and stand firm whenever she did was her father; that whatever was decent and of good report in her character was put there by her father; she did not know that she worshiped him.

I do not think that GSAW would have the same emotional impact, without the previous reading of TKAM. Since I also had an idealized view of Atticus, I was able to completely empathize with Jean Louise’s disillusionment. It is deeply upsetting to find out someone you looked up to is not who you thought they were. I thought that I would be able to keep the Atticus of TKAM and the Atticus of GSAW separate in my mind, but I easily merged the two. He was still a man who loved his children and believed in the law. He does not see himself in the same light as Mr. O’Hanlon, who is ranting and raving early on in the book. His racism comes from a place of (deeply flawed) logic and he hides behind states’ rights when confronted about his views on segregation. If his actions in the previous book came from a place of paternalism, which recent criticism suggests, the more extreme viewpoint of elderly Atticus is not that much of a leap. I have known good people that I would have never suspected of bigotry, until society went “too far” and crossed a line in their minds. For Atticus Finch that line is Brown vs. Board of Education and desegregation, which he sees as a Supreme Court overreach. A complicated man may be more realistic and the story it is really relatable, but it is still deeply unsettling. I was shocked how much this realization about a fictional character felt like a punch in the gut. It makes me a little sad that future readers will not be able to see him without this dark cloud. [spoiler]Advance reviews did prepare me for the change in Atticus, but I was absolutely not prepared for the heartbreaking scene when Scout visits Calpurnia.[/spoiler] I really felt for Jean Louise as she began to feel that her whole life was a lie. I also really related to the Coffee scene. I liked how when Jean Louise entered these social situations she just kind of heard the awful highlights. It was a really accurate way to display the whirlwind of shock she was going through.

“What was this blight that had come down over the people she loved? Did she see it in stark relief because she had been away from it? Had it percolated gradually through the years until now? Had it always been under her nose for her to see if she had only looked? No, not the last. What turned ordinary men into screaming dirt at the top of their voices, what made her kind of people harden and say “nigger” when the word had never crossed their lips before?”
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“Why doesn’t their flesh creep? How can they devoutly believe everything they hear in church and then say the things they do and listen to the things they hear without throwing up? I thought I was a Christian but I’m not. I’m something else and I don’t know what. Everything I have ever taken for right and wrong these people have taught me—these same, these very people. So it’s me, it’s not them. Something has happened to me.”

I was happy that there was still a spark of “juvenile desperado, hell-raiser extraordinary” in Jean Louise. She gets the town talking pretty much the moment she enters it! She is more progressive than Atticus and she has good intentions, but she certainly is a person of her time and is racist herself (“But, Uncle Jack, I don’t especially want to run out and marry a Negro or something.” “They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”). The narrative is a little scattered and meanders between childhood flashbacks, Jean Louise’s verbal sparring matches with her aunt, flirtation between Jean Louise and Henry and Jean Louise’s psychological turmoil. It is written in third person, but there are some jarring transitions into first when we hear some of Jean Louise’s thoughts. The dialogue towards the end got really preachy and there was a lot of “mansplaining.” [spoiler]At one point, an uncle LITERALLY slaps some “sense” into Jean Louise.[/spoiler]

(referring to Civil War) As it rolled by, Jean Louise made a frantic dive for her uncle’s trolley: “That’s been over for a—nearly a hundred years, sir.” Dr. Finch grinned. “Has it really? It depends how you look at it. If you were sitting on the sidewalk in Paris, you’d say certainly. But look again. The remnants of that little army had children—God, how they multiplied—the South went through the Reconstruction with only one permanent political change: there was no more slavery. The people became no less than what they were to begin with—in some cases they became horrifyingly more. They were never destroyed. They were ground into the dirt and up they popped. (This part and the passages about collective conscious made me think of The Buried Giant).

The book is about a young woman recognizing that her dad is a human and not a god and learning that she has her own conscience separate from her father’s. It is about how people are complicated and that a person is more than just their bad aspects. It is about empathy for everyone, even those we disagree with. It is about standing for up for what you believe and not running away when things get tough. As Dr. Finch said: “The time your friends need you is when they’re wrong, Jean Louise. They don’t need you when they’re right—”.

I am most interested in this book as insight into the creative process that led to TKAM. My 3-Star rating is based on the fact that this is a mostly untouched draft, not character viewpoints. I know it is impossible now, but I would have liked to see how it turned out if it had maintained its basic structure during the editing process instead of turning into TKAM. This book is really relevant today, especially in context of the Supreme Court’s gay marriage decision and the Confederate flag controversy. The viewpoint Atticus expresses in this book sounds outdated at first glance, but I have heard Atticus’s argument very recently in relation to local school board drama. It may not be a must-read for fans of TKAM, but it is definitely interesting and memorable in its own right.

I did not want my world disturbed, but I wanted to crush the man who’s trying to preserve it for me. I wanted to stamp out all the people like him. I guess it’s like an airplane: they’re the drag and we’re the thrust, together we make the thing fly. Too much of us and we’re nose-heavy, too much of them and we’re tail-heavy—it’s a matter of balance. I can’t beat him, and I can’t join him—

…Khaled remembered what he had originally intended to tell his father, what he had hoped his father would recognize: the fascinating possibility of finding the way back to a home that one has never known. No one knew how the second- or third- generation monarchs found their way back north when they had never been there before. Even now, when he was too old to believe in any of Ehsan’s fables, Khaled would sometimes remember her stories of lost boys following unseen clues home and imagine that the butterflies, like those boys, had an inner compass that directed them to where they were supposed to be, and the idea of a home that one carried within filled him with hope and peace.

Touching, beautifully written debut novel about an Egyptian-American family trying to work through shock and grief, after the oldest son Hosaam kills himself and his neighbor/girlfriend. The story takes place one year after the murders, in post-9/11 New Jersey. After a short lull, tensions begin to escalate again when flyers for the young murdered woman’s memorial are taped up all over town. Samir, who has a history of making situations worse, wants to make amends by speaking at the memorial, but his family doesn’t think that is a great idea.

His new Facebook page contained a picture of him in profile, the sun shining so brightly in the background his face was visible only as a dark silhouette, the shade of his skin undecipherable, his features one dark mass. Those whom he befriended on Facebook could see a couple of other pictures in which he was recognizable but his surroundings were not: self-portraits of him out on his hikes, with backdrops of trees and open meadows. His face, a dark tan that could have easily passed for any ethnicity, from mixed to Hispanic, was not antagonistic. People did not object to his face, he learned, as much as they objected to his name. And his initials, though they were still his, could imply any name. Karlos Aguilar, with roots both in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Khristos Agathangelos, standing in the front yard of his Mediterranean villa in the Greek isles. Or, his favorite, Kevin Anderson.

The Al-Menshawys have been accepted members of their Somerset community for two decades, but their idyllic, suburban town quickly turns on them when the tragedy strikes. The family experience bigotry and public shaming, as they and their entire culture get blamed for the singular actions of their son. The family becomes isolated from the community and each other. Samir, Nagla, Khaled and Fatima all live under the same roof, but they are each carrying the burden of the tragedy on their own. Samir, who has always desperately wanted his family to blend in and belong, has to cope with his family being ostracized. Nagla struggles with both the grief of losing her son and the anger at his actions, while also blaming herself for ignoring the past hints that now seem like obvious clues of what was to come. Khaled worries about living in the shadow of his brother and starts to pull away from his culture, while his sister Fatima begins to embrace it. Their grandmother Ehsan is visiting from Egypt to help the family during their time of grief. Ehsan’s “old ways” and superstitions sometimes frustrate and embarrass the Al-Menshaways in their modern environment, but she is the common thread that binds them all together.

Again one of Nagla’s convictions was confirmed: A lifetime of watching American movies had not taught her mother anything about American social norms. Yet every single breach of American notions of etiquette that Nagla witnessed her mother commit resulted in a connection with someone, a momentary intersection between her mother’s life and a stranger’s that, paradoxically, Nagla could not find fault with, perhaps even envied.

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My only disappointment is that this is a debut novel, so I can’t seek out the author’s other books yet! I recommend this work for fans of Everything I Never Told You, and to a lesser extent, The Book of Unknown Americans.

Khaled wished he could tell his father what he had only now realized: that they were all trying to undo something that Hosaam did, hoping that, by their hands or by God’s, fate would change course and all would be well again. But they were damned no matter what they did, not by God, but by a nineteen-year-old boy who had lost the will to live, and, perhaps, by their own failure to see it coming, to prevent disaster rather than scramble in a futile attempt to change the past. First surrender. And then learn to fly.

Jack Jordan, a somewhat smug foreign correspondent, shares her best friend Sarabeth with the somewhat shallow stay-at-home supermom Kitty Carricoe. Jack and Kitty have been sworn enemies since a misunderstanding during college and the rivalry has escalated out of control over the last couple of decades. When Sarabeth’s husband in involved in a fatal plane crash, Jack and Kitty rush to Sarabeth’s side. They become suspicious of the circumstances of the husband’s death and team up to investigate.

The chapters alternate between Jack’s and Kitty’s points of view. The main story takes place in 2014, but there are also lots of flashbacks. Before the story starts there is a series of invitations and hotel letters, which I think was a really fun way to start the book. The Best of Enemies really illustrates the importance of communication and how the littlest misunderstandings and assumptions can drive the biggest wedges between people. All of Kitty’s and Jack’s drama could have been avoided with a little communication and empathy.

I chose this book because of the comparison to Bridesmaids (which I loved) and Big Little Lies (which I liked). The Best of Enemies is this the deepest I have gone down the chick lit rabbit hole and the book was a little bit of a mismatch for me as a reader. I have to say, this is the first time I have come across the terms “amazeballs,” “totes legitamittens,” and “faboo” in a book! There is a lot of (tongue-in-cheek) modern lifestyle blogger lingo, texting speak, pop culture references and brand name/celebrity name dropping. I have never seen Top Gun or Risky Business (I know, I know!), so many of the references were lost on me. Those who were teenagers or young adults in the 1980s will probably get the maximum enjoyment from this book.

It is better to leave the ego and to get viagra pharmacy prices on the web. Insomnia is most often professional viagra cheap defined by an individual’s eating habits. It is also available in buy viagra unica-web.com 100mg strength. Very similar to viagra generico 5mg , this drug has huge and unnecessary risk when brought from offshore websites. The alternating chapters technique is really effective for this story, because you get to read Jack’s and Kitty’s hilariously different interpretations of the same event! My favorite part of the entire book was when Jack and Kitty teamed up. The back and forth of their dialogue was really fun to read. I wished they could have partnered up earlier, because the introductions and set-up seemed to take ages. The first 200 pages seemed so slow and then a lot happened in the last 100 pages.

I think the author did a great job of making Kitty seem really unlikable in the beginning and then slowly making the reader want to be her friend! Jack was an interesting character as well and I really liked her close relationship with her family. All the other characters were a bit one dimensional. There is a lot of fun, snarky dialogue. Sometimes when the subjects got more serious, the dialogue was more stilted (a conversation between Kitty and Bobby discussing raising kids in the internet age and a scene at John-John’s house). Things got totes ridic at the end! [spoiler]I was a little disappointed when Jack reveals that she wants to quit her badass job and decides what she wants more than anything is a husband and a family. It was a weird turn for the character. I wonder if the dynamic between Jack and Kitty would be as interesting in a sequel. The two villainous monologues were a little bit too much for me too. [/spoiler]

Even though this was just an okay read for me, I think it will be enjoyable for fans of the genre. I think it would make a really fun movie!

“I can’t wait till I have grandchildren. When I was younger, I had to walk to the rim of a crater. Uphill! In an EVA suit! On Mars, ya little shit! Ya hear me? Mars!”

This audiobook was the second selection in the “Taryn and Elias Summer Road Trip Series.” 🙂 The Martian is such a funny and entertaining read. The Martian is hard science fiction novel (i.e. no fantastical elements) about Mark Watney, a sarcastic, slightly immature astronaut who is left for dead on the planet Mars. He wakes up alone and injured on the Red Planet and has to use his scientific knowledge to prolong his chances for survival.

“If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re massively outnumbered by the people who do.”

The story alternates between Mark Watney’s logs, NASA, the Ares 3 crew and an omniscient narrator who you will learn to dread! The book starts out with Mark’s logs and I was unsure what all the fuss was about at first, but I was hooked after the first section back at NASA. So if you aren’t quite feeling the first few pages, I recommend sticking it out until that point! There are many scientific explanations, but it is not so overly technical or complicated that it is difficult to comprehend. Even when I didn’t have a complete grasp on a concept, I was able to understand the main point. At heart, this book is about the will to survive and the deep-rooted need humans have to help others…and the inherent magic of duct tape.

“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”

I really liked the use of the [spoiler]news media in the book. It is so weird that this man is stranded on Mars and it has become an almost reality show spectacle back on Earth! [/spoiler]. Mark remains cheerful and maintains his sarcastic sense of humor during his horrifying ordeal. It is impossible not to root for him! That he was able to maintain his enthusiastically positive outlook during the entire duration of being marooned on a planet 140,000,000 miles from Earth is a little unrealistic, but I was able to convince myself that it was possible to extend his psychological well-being by maintaining a work routine. I did think was starting to show a few signs of cracking. The book has also been criticized for being predictable, but the anticipation of seeing how he overcomes each new problem really keeps the book interesting. It would be interesting to read [spoiler]how the rest of the Ares 3 mission goes and any lasting effects of the ordeal on Mark and the crew back on earth. [/spoiler] When the end audio credits started, I felt as if I had also survived an epic journey!
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This book was so perfect for the audiobook format. R.C. Bray was a great choice for Mark Watney’s voice and he really was able to bring the other characters to life. Mark’s logs are written very conversationally and I think some of his phrasing and humor comes off better with the spoken word. I just pretended that he was recording audio logs. I am really excited to see the movie, because I am many of the pictures in my head were completely inaccurate! Though something in the crew introduction teaser makes me worried that they are going to shoehorn in a romance that wasn’t there! Update: The movie was awesome! Great adaptation!

Highly recommended as an entertaining read, especially the audiobook!

“The screen went black before I was out of the airlock. Turns out the “L” in “LCD” stands for “Liquid.” I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.”