January is always windy in Oklahoma, and the cold it carries finds its way between zippers, and seams in ways that make it more intense than even people from colder climates expect. Unfortunately this seldom brings snow, which is the very best reading weather.
So by the numbers; 6 books, only one of them fiction. My favorite authors this January were David McCullough and Barbara W. Tuchman. Uncle Toms Cabin was the most famous book of the month and the only fiction book I read. What stood out to me about Uncle Toms Cabin was that 19th century religious dogma was so ingrained into the daily life of people (this was, after-all, the time of the Third Great Awakening in North America.) My least favorite book was The Great Fire of Rome by Stephen Dando-Collins which honestly wasn’t bad; but I read a lot of good books in January.
Below are some of the quotes that stood out and that I’m likely to want to reference.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough
Human reason is the work of God, and he gave it to us so we could recognize him.
When a demagogue want to effect an object, he always raises the cup of public virtue; and under the cover of the smoke he raises slips in himself.
The Ascent of Money by Neil Ferguson
Throughout the history of Western civilization, there has been a recurrent hostility to finance and financiers, rooted in the idea that those who make their living from lending money are somehow parasitical on the ‘real’ economic activities of agriculture and manufacturing.
It is partly because debtors have tended to outnumber creditors and the former have seldom felt very well disposed towards the latter. It is partly because financial crises and scandals occur frequently enough to make finance appear to be a cause of poverty rather than prosperity, volatility rather than stability. And it is partly because, for centuries, financial services in countries all over the world were disproportionately provided by members of ethnic or religious minorities, who had been excluded from land ownership or public office but enjoyed success in finance because of their own tight-knit networks of kinship and trust.
Hunter-gatherers do not trade. They raid.
What the conquistadors failed to understand is that money is a matter of belief, even faith: belief in the person paying us; belief in the person issuing the money he uses or the institution that honours his cheques or transfers. Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed.
A bold and innovative approach to the problem of black poverty . . . would be to look at ways to turn tenants into homeowners . . . For the black poor, real progress may come only once they have an ownership stake in American society. People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not. . .
…the Nobel prize winners had known plenty of mathematics, but not enough history.
I remain more than ever convinced that, until we fully under stand the origin of financial species, we shall never understand the fundamental truth about money: that, far from being ‘a monster that must be put back in its place’, as the German president recently complained, financial markets are like the mirror of mankind, revealing every hour of every working day the way we value ourselves and the resources of the world around us.
It is not the fault of the mirror if it reflects our blemishes as clearly as our beauty.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Of course, in a novel, people’s hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone through
Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.
How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson
Our lives are surrounded and supported by a whole class of objects that are enchanted with the ideas and creativity of thousands of people who came before us: inventors and hobbyists and reformers who steadily hacked away at the problem of making artificial light or clean drinking water so that we can enjoy those luxuries today without a second thought, without even thinking of them as luxuries in the first place.
A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman
After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening”on a lucky day”without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena.
The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold” (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead.
When piety and virtue, the supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously sought.
Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.