Book Reports

Willa Cather's "My Antonia" is a wonderful tutorial for anyone wanting, in the face of struggle, to develop a positive mental attitude. The book also offers deep insight into how immigrant trials and tribulations have helped shape the United States as a nation of achievers... at least until recently.

"L'Audace, toujours l'audace!"

"The Paris Apartment" is more complex than the first two Foley novels I read. The topic is darker... the characters more sinister... and the presence of true evil looms larger.

"Project Hail Mary," which can be read quickly, is a fascinating, hypothetical account about first contact with an alien species. The novel contains a hopeful vision about interstellar cooperation.

This is a powerful book about good and evil. Steinbeck raises the possibility that good or evil traits can be inherited. Cal, with seeming evil proclivities, possibly inherited from his clearly evil mother, wants to be good... tries to be good... and lives with this internal struggle. Cal's brother Aron is a good boy... but, unlike risk taker and high achiever Cal, he lives his life fearing failure. One of the strengths of the novel is how well Steinbeck writes about these moral complexities.

Reading these classic novels reveals an exciting apex of modern literature accomplishment, even if one has to look backwards to see it.

In an era where the broader culture scorns so-called toxic male behavior and where many males are adrift and without work, culturally unmoored males might look to Rogan, Yellowstone, and Carr as depicting role models at odds with cultural trends that seem to suppress aggressive male behavior... hence the growing success of strong male, revenge-oriented themes in media, novels and video.

Brodie has long passed from the scene, but I don't think she'd be surprised at the Church success today having ably chronicled the amazing life of Joseph Smith.  No, she didn't believe that Joseph saw God or that he unearthed ancient Golden Plates as he claimed.  But methinks that were she present today, she might be willing to aver that God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.

Fast read on a topical subject and a scary, sobering tutorial on how money can buy off American justice.

I'm not saying I'm Oliver Ward.  But I would be Oliver Ward if I could wave a magic wand to make it happen.

Insurance companies pass on doctor price gouging, which they reimburse, in the form of increased premiums to everyone else. Everything wrong with health care: People are price gouged for a procedure they don't need after taking medications that were marked up by her pharmacy benefits manager (PBM). "The contrast between the money games of medicine and the mission of our predecessors who worked so hard to earn the public trust couldn't be sharper." One simple thing you can do: ask for a price every tie you are considering a medical service.

In January of 2015, Thomas Gilbert Jr., age thirty, arrived unannounced at his parents' Upper East Side home.  Tommy sent his mom out for a sandwich and shot his father, a hedge-fund owner,  point-blank in the head.  He then staged the murder as a suicide.  The proximate motivation for the shooting is that Dad cut Tommy's allowance.