The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin

My brother-in-law, Stuart, was reading this book when I visited them a few weeks ago. He kindly finished reading it so I could take it back on the plane. I used to follow the Supreme Court decisions a lot more, but over the past 10 years with the exception of Gore v. Bush, I have not paid a lot of attention. Somehow the whole Clarence Thomas hearing thing and the tilt to the right depressed me and I just turned it off. 

So I enjoyed catching up on the 9 justices. I have always like Sandra Day O'Connor. I read her book about growing up on the Lazy B Ranch (poorly written, but an amazing story)  in Arizona. I enjoyed the tidbits in here about how she viewed attractive and unattractive behavior. As the swing vote for the Court, it was interesting to see how she, Breyer, Souter and Kennedy formed and interesting block and moved the Court for a short time more to the center from 2001-2005. Rehnquist turns out to be a good administrator processing the Court's business efficiently. Thomas, does not believe in the precedent of former cases "stares decisis".. A supporter of Ayn Rand and rugged individualism, he does not get assigned many opinions because few justices supported his extreme view.  

The politics of the religious right in pushing to overturn Roe v. Wade and pushing for Terry Schiavo to remain alive in her vegetative state, the Bush nominations of Harriet Miers and John Roberts all made for some good reading. I was most interested in how international law and the visits that Justices made abroad influenced their thinking on issues like the death penalty and the harshness of our juvenile justice system.

The current court has now decidedly moved to the right. One of the tragedies of the loss of the Gore presidency in 2000 is the shaping of the court  for the next 15 years. Yet even with his loss, it was interesting to note how over time, a number of the Republican justices, like O'Connor, shifted their politics more to the center.

Loretta Mason Potts by Mary Chase

I selected this book for our October book club as one of my favorite books from childhood.  Mary Chase, the author, is best known for her famous play "Harvey".  I love how the book begins, "Colin Mason was ten years old before he learned he had an older sister. And he never forgot this day because things were never the same again." The book is about a bad girl who leaves her family to live with a farmer and his family so that she can visit a magical world over the hill where a Countess lives in a castle with a General. The Countess loves everything that Loretta says or does. Loretta finally comes back to live with her family and gradually, her brothers and sister discover Loretta's magical world through her bedroom closet and eventually they destroy the secret of the magical world as Loretta becomes close to her mother again.

"Loretta said nothing. She had walked across the bridge this afternoon, a girl named Loretta Mason Potts.  But that girl had dropped into the stream and vanished.  Now as she looked around the forest she didn't say anything out loud.  But she asked the trees a question, "Isn't there anything, anyone, anywhere, for me just for me and no one else?" p. 116

I realized that I related to this book because I identified with Loretta who left her family in part because her mother was too busy for her because she was taking care of younger children. She found a magical world where she was adored. I have always liked closets with mysterious passageways that lead into magical worlds (shades of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). And somehow the fact that Loretta took on a different last name and that she acted badly toward all who were around her, I must have felt were daring and cool things at the age of nine years old.

It was fun to reread this book and realize why I liked it as a kid. We had a really fun book group at my house that night (see photo below) and it was fun to see the kinds of books we all liked as kids. The books people chose really reflected the personalities of our book clubbers!

The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan

I have occasionally read "food" books such as Fast Food Nation, Sapphires and Garlic. I enjoyed this book which sets out to examine the natural history of our meals: Industrial: Corn, Pastoral: Grass, and Personal: Forest. 

Probably the most interesting part to me was the Corn section and thinking about how we have traded the use of a natural energy source, the sun, for fossil fuels to grow our food (artificial nitrates, machines using oil to cultivate).  Our big farmers have also moved from raising a diverse set of crops and animals to focusing on just a few- corn and soy. The surplus in corn in turn needs to find new markets, which means now corn is used in many products from breakfast cereals to soft drinks (more fossil fuel to process it) and it is used to feed our livestock who no longer wander in the meadows munching grass. Then we use more fossil fuel to transport the corn products (and animals to feed lots) all over the country. It is a depressing cycle and hard to imagine breaking out of!

Pollan extolls the virtues of the Virginia farmer who rotates his fields with diverse crops and allows his animals to live "free range", living and producing his food only for a local market. Organic foods have sold out to big business with clever marketing schemes about Rosie the cow according to Pollan.  One of the big sell outs is Cascadian Farms where we often stop coming back from Stevens Pass.

The last section of the book was a little bit harder to stay engaged with as Pollan seeks to create a meal that he alone has grown and or hunted. While I appreciated his description of his pig hunt and mushroom gathering, it was just not as interesting as the first part of the book.

Born on a Blue Day by Daniel Tammet

Ever since I took a course at Evergreen on the science of the mind, I have been interested in how the brain works. This book is amazing, because the author, Daniel Tammet, who is an autistic savant is able to describe how he learns. He sees numbers and letters as shapes that do not look like numbers -- tall round short and with colors. He has numbers that make him happy like 333 and numbers that make him sad like 117. He is best known for memorizing Pi out to 22,500 digits without an error, which he did as a fund raiser for epilepsy.  He also can learn foreign languages easily, like Icelandic in a week. Daniel tells the painful story of growing up different and how he has learned to cope with his idiosyncracies in a world that did not understand him. One of my favorite parts was when he got up the courage to volunteer to teach English in Lithuania. He had never been away from home and did not like to encounter strange things. This is a great story about the people who loved Daniel (he has 9 siblings and his parents) and his own personal struggle. This guy is one of my heroes.

"People with Asperger's syndrome do want to make friends but find it difficult to do so. The keen sense of isolation was something I felt very deeply and was very painful for me. As a way of compensating for the lack of friends, I created my own...We talked about my love of ladybirds and my coin towers, about books, about numbers, about tall trees...once I asked her why I was so different from the other children, but she shook her head  and said she could not say.  I worried that the answer was terrible and that she was trying to protect me."