Blog

by Jenny Odell, 2019

Too many big words and thoughts! This young lady is just too smart! She doesn’t appear to believe in God so all of her deep philosophizing is for naught because, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” Psalm 127:1

Without reading the book, Wayne predicted what it would be about, and it really would have made a lot more sense with this framework:

Thoughtful Resistance

-Saying “NO” to anger, fear, mindless drivel, and unreasoned consumption

-Saying “YES” to Philippians 4:8, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.“

She’s writing about how to resist the “attention economy,” which is how social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have commandeered our attention and we’re missing the real world while we constantly check our phones for the latest media frenzy. As I write this, the latest media frenzy is the corona virus; we’ve moved on from politics (Trump and the Democrats and Super Tuesday). She loves birds and bird-watching and she recommends getting outside in parks and natural areas. Bird-watching does slow you down and you start to notice things you have never noticed before and the world does become much more interesting and beautiful. I like the stories she tells in between the philosophizing; describing art and artists, birds and bird-watching, parks and natural areas, and the history of communes (that all failed to find Utopia and instead became a living hell for their members).

Here are some examples of sentences that make no sense to me:

“In a time when meaningful action will require us to form new alliances and recognize differences at the same time, bioregionalism is also useful as a model of difference without boundary, a way of understanding place and identity that avoids essentialism and reification.”

And here’s another one:

“Basically, the space of appearance is an encounter small and concentrated enough that the plurality of its actors is un-collapsed.”

See what I mean?

There are some parts of the book that are understandable. Here is an example:

Matt Kracht, 2019

This was supposed to be one of the funniest books of 2019, but it’s mainly an unfunny, potty-mouthed berating of birds. He likes to use the f-word, butt, dumb, gd, etc. I didn’t read it for that reason, just scanned a few. Here’s what he says about the wonderful chickadee that is starting to do it’s beautiful song and fills me with the hope of spring after this really, really long winter:

Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

by Beth Macy, 2018

Painful, scary book about the opioid epidemic, which started with the release of Oxycontin by Purdue Pharma in the mid 1990s. This was a drug so powerful and so over-prescribed by doctors in the Appalachian areas, that many were addicted and when Purdue Pharma finally, finally made it abuse resistant, the addicted turned to heroin, which was cheaper and more powerful. The damage was done and we’re still paying for it as families go through the living nightmare of caring for a heroin addict. She tells the history of opioids, Oxycontin, heroin, and tells real-life stories of doctors, policeman, dealers, and addicts. America, we have yet another nearly unsolvable problem created by our greed and inherent dissatisfaction. There is not an easy answer to the problem of addiction; we don’t even know what really works for opioid addiction. Scary, scary, scary.

by Kate O’Neill, 2019

Interesting, short (189 pages), academic book on garbage, particularly e-waste, food waste, and plastic. Main take-away is we are producing more and more waste and it will take all of us to manage it. For e-waste, that means changing the way things are produced so that they can be repaired (Right to Repair movement) as well as making them safe to recycle in order to reclaim their useful parts. For food waste, that means changing expiration dates to be uniform and meaningful, for one thing. For plastics, that means developing alternatives to single use plastic and government involvement in many things but for example, waste to energy (burning) and recycling. China stopped taking the world’s plastic, paper, and other scrap in August 2018 causing an immediate shock to the whole world. We’ve still not overcome it.

by James W. Loewen, 2018

Eye-opening book about the sorry state of American History textbooks in high schools. This was one of our Old Town Library Book Club selections for 2019-2020. He provides the truth about Woodrow Wilson (extremely racist), Helen Keller (ardent socialist), Christopher Columbus (extreme brutality to the natives), the first Thanksgiving, how racism is invisible in the history books, how anti-racism is invisible in the history books, how the history books completely overlook the Vietnam War, how they don’t cover the recent past, and why history is taught this way.

Here are the chapter titles:

by James E. Hansen II, Gordon A. Hazard, Linda M. Meyer, 2018

Very complete book giving pictures and history of EVERY building and even the places of Colorado State University. Especially liked the pictures of the first buildings in the late 1800s (the Pioneer Era from 1870-1909). They divided it into The Pioneer Era (1870-1909), Charles A. Lory Era (1909-1940), William E. Morgan Era (1949-1969), Modern University Era (1969-1990), and Digital Era (1990-2017). I especially liked:

1. Jesse Harris Spring (1901-present): stone fountain that is still standing to the north of Spruce Hall (on 100 block of Old Main Drive), donated by Jesse Harris, former Fort Collins mayor and State Board of Agriculture member. The water was piped from Bailey’s Spring, located on land in the foothills. “Many local citizens distrusted the city’s tap water and believed that the spring had medicinal qualities. They filled jugs at the Jesse Harris Spring to take home for drinking. The fountain proved its worth when an outbreak of typhoid was traced to the city supply, and the high sulfur content kept the spring water safe to drink…By 1921, the old iron pipes had rusted. The cost of pipe replacement, and the fact that the spring was running dry, led the administration to quietly decide that the Jesse Harris Spring should be connected to the city water tap…”

2. Every tennis court ever located at CSU. The first were three dirt courts in 1908. The courts Wayne played on while in college existed from 1961 until 2009; eight courts directly east of what would become Moby Arena. The current 12 courts located on Research Boulevard cost $2 million and opened in 2010. It is considered “one of the nation’s finest college facilities.”

3. Quonset huts that were used as housing for veterans from 1946-1961. Carla lived in one of these when she was a baby.

4. The dairy farm was originally the Hahn Farm which I think was located near West Prospect and South Shields Street, then moved in 1981 to north of the Veterinary Teaching Hospital, but closed in 1989 due to financial losses and complaints of odors.

5. Hughes Stadium: Pat Stryker gave $15 million towards it in 2003 to honor both Albert Yates and Sonny Lubick. Hughes Stadium existed from 1968 to 2017, the last playing season was 2016. The book was published before it was decided to make Hughes Stadium area into a residential development.

6. Includes pictures of Old Main, including after the fire on Friday, May 8, 1970. Someone started it in protest of the Vietnam War. The picture shows all that was left of this beautiful building was the brick and stone shell. It’s a haunting picture. What a terrible loss.

7. The new stadium – the most controversial facility ever built on campus. Funding fell short but even so, the Board of Governors authorized $239 million to build the structure, which opened in fall of 2017.

8. The Mountain Campus, 1914-present: originally named after “George W. Pingree (a Civil War veteran and participant in the infamous Sand Creek Massacre), who ran a logging camp there from 1868 to 1870 to supply railroad ties for the Union Pacific Railroad.”

An excellent book – I love the old pictures from back in the 1870s to early 1900s.

by Jessica Bruder, 2017

Eye-opening book about a subculture of aging Americans living in RVs, vans, or cars and traveling around the country. Gretchen recommended this book. These Americans lost homes in the 2008 Great Recession, went through messy divorces, had physical injuries or illnesses, or a combination of factors that made them unable to afford rent along with everything else. They purchase used vans, RVs, or even cars and begin living in them. They work in terribly difficult, low-paying seasonal jobs like Amazon warehouses (“workampers”), the sugar beet harvest, campground hosts, tourist traps, and amusement parks. She focuses on one particular person, Linda May, and tells this most interesting and depressing of stories through her. Things I learned: You can clean foggy headlamps with insect repellent and an old t-shirt. Earthships are intriguing! Linda May dreams of building one. She finally purchases a cheap piece of ground near Douglas, Arizona, and will build one. Black people are not among these people; is it racism among these nomads? Or more than likely, black people know they would be fined, jailed, or possibly worse if police found them to be stealth camping in towns and cities, whereas white people are simply checked on and sometimes helped.

by Robert B. Reich, 2018

Adam saw this book over at Ben’s house so I got it from the library. Mom read it first and said, “This was an excellent read. I sense a slipping away of everyone in the U.S.A. focusing on ‘me!’ and self only.” It’s true and he gives three reasons for this: The whatever-it-takes-to-win politics (mainly started by Nixon and the Watergate scandal), whatever-it-takes-to-maximize profits (businesses used to care about their employees, their communities, their customers, and now it’s screw them, just make money. He uses Michael Milken and Jack Welch as examples of this ‘whatever-it-takes-to-maximize profits’ attitude). And the whatever-it-takes to rig the economy is the third reason we’ve lost our sense of the common good. He attributes this to Lewis Powell’s memo, Tony Coelho’s bargain, and the Wall Street bailout.

He says this is not a book about Trump. Trump is not the cause; he is a consequence of the loss of our sense of the common good. He lists and describes 52 incidents that have occurred since the mid-1960s that showcase the decline. Here is the one that gets me the most:

2016 Price-gouging by Mylan Pharmaceuticals. The firm ratchets up the price of its EpiPen emergency injection kit, containing only about $1 worth of the drug epinephrine, to $609 a box. Mylan has an effective monopoly on the lifesaving product. The company’s revenue skyrockets to $11 billion. In 2016, Robert Coury, Mylan’s chairman, receives compensation of $98 million (including vesting of prior stock options, $160 million).

from page 62 in the chapter entitled, “Exploitation”

The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

by John Fea, 2018

Excellent book by an Evangelical who is an American history professor and chair of the history department at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He dedicates the book, “To the 19 percent.” He seeks to explain how 81% of evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump. He starts with the politics of fear: First, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio played the politics of fear in their campaigns, and it worked so well, Donald Trump was seen as the only one who was strong enough to save them from the fear of rapist, drug-dealing illegal immigrants; Muslims coming to murder us; evil Liberals taking over our country.