Jeremy

What are we working for?
What are we achieving?
Is it all for naught?

Likely.

Relationships matter. Little else does.

Everything else is just a hologram. Here one minute, so real as if you can reach out and touch it. Just another of life's near misses the next minute.

Love Eggars. Not my favorite of his works though.

I think I get it, just wasn't that into it.

Grippingly mundane.

How Children Succeed by Paul Tough will force you to think about pressure we put on teachers to educate in the classroom when a host of determinate factors outside of the classroom may be more apt to tell whether a child "succeeds."

In what I can only describe as a Gladwellian analysis of characteristics of successful children, Tough goes far beyond the classroom and uncovers the necessity of harder to measure factors such as "Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character."

This book presents a necessary perspective to understand how we must change our approach from simply the education of a child, to a more holistic approach of "child development" that creates intuitive pathways to develop things like care, character, drive, and determination even in the midst of often bleak economic and social circumstances.

I highly recommend this book.

The New Jim Crow has been reopening my eyes to the modern system of enslavement that still exists in our drug war culture. It’s a mechanized system of mass incarceration that ingests people and spits out corpses with the brandished label of a “criminal.”

Too often we can create tunnel vision excuses for panoramic systems of injustice because we only analyze a problem based on the top 10% of the iceberg that’s in our face, meanwhile a behemoth lurks beneath the surface unnoticed. Michelle Alexander’s work in this book helps complete the picture. She dives down to get beneath the superficial anecdotes. She relays the history, identifies tipping points along the way and uses broad strokes and individual stories to make the message clear: Slavery may have ended, civil rights may be written into law, but there is a still a purposeful and intentional modern Jim Crow war against communities of color, and African Americans in particular, that can’t be denied.

I strongly suggest if you’re a person of justice or seeking understanding, that you pick up The New Jim Crow.

Wonderful reading by Karen White. Great intonation and believability as a first person reader.

The story itself was an intimate retelling of life on the farm. The urban farm. The city-dweller's forty by sixty chain link fence crop container. A realistic acknowledgement of the work, idiosyncrasies and lunacy of trying to eat off the land amidst the culture of the city.

I loved this memoir if it could be called such a work.

Simply masterful. Beginning to end. You know the man, his character, his strengths and flaws, and the personal drive and fortunate accidents that led him to become the first leader of our great country.

The reading was hard to listen to. The tone of his voice and the challenging slow pace made it a difficult listen. In addition, the content didn't seem to line up with it's title. It didn't seem radical. It seemed self-actualized, but not transcendental to the reader.

Isaacson does a great job defining and realizing the character of Benjamin Franklin. You know him. You know him to the point where the last few chapters become predictive. Not the writing. But the last few chapters of Franklin's life.

Perhaps most astonishing is the way sheer mass of Franklin's legacy. It's written on the parchment of America's story in so many ways defining culture, government, philosophy, arts, finance, and even the sense of a self-deprecating comedic undertones to American Life.

Runger's reading was spot on. Especially the "character" voices he would use to go in and out of quoted text.

Flawless. Except for the tears. Father Boyle immediately draws you in with his accounts of the tragic lives of the gang members he lives and works with in LA.

Utterly redemptive. Positively emotional. Raw. Purposeful.

Amazing read.