My new bookends holding the books of my current reading interest

I got a very special gift of water buffalo bookends from Gloria and Tom; it was carved from a nice piece of wood (looks like and feels like mahogany wood).  Tom was thinking about me when he spotted this set of bookends, as he has heard my childhood story.

Water buffalo was integral in the country life of the small village (Xia-Tan, 下潭) that I spent my childhood until my 5^th grade when we moved to Po-Tzu, and water buffalo was our U-Haul.

The most exciting event in a tranquil country life was when the water buffalos were fighting.  If I were to have Hemingway’s talent, I would have made writing of water buffalo fighting an art, like we read in his The Sun Also Rises or The Death in the Afternoon. 

I have seen enough of it; but one never grew tired of watching bullfight.  Worried about the water buffalos might get hurt, the adults all tried to break the fight, using the long “bamboo post” (our ‘dryer’), which was not too effective; it suits us children just fine, so we could enjoy the show a bit longer.  Who said the country boy grew up without any entertainment?

Jefferson said “I cannot live without books”; if he were to see the bookends I have, he would have said “I cannot live without books and bookends.”

Books about FDR:  The last five months of FDR’s life                                                                   The books between this set of bookends are my current reading interests, which may be fleeting or lasting for months at a stretch. These books are constantly changing, adding or removing along with the shifting of my reading interest.  There are several books about FDR as I am reading the story of the last five months of his life (December 1944 until his death on April 12, 1945).

One cannot tell the whole story of these five months without mentioning Lucy Mercer—FDR's “old flame” back in 1916, as Lucy began to visit FDR again in December 1944. In fact, Lucy was with FDR the moment when he was stricken by cerebral hemorrhage on April 12, 1945.

However, I was reluctant to talk about this “love story” for Jo threatened to boycott my blog if I were to 'glorify' or even to condone any extramarital affair. The readership of my blog is already so limited, with Jo's boycott, it may become the 'classic' of what Mark Twain described as “a book which people praise and don't read.” Jo, you can boycott, but I will find a way to elevate it.

When Margaret Suckley (known as Daisy, FDR’s distant cousin) died at age of 99 in 1991, it was discovered that her diaries and 38 letters written to her by FDR were in a suitcase hidden under her bed.  The book of Closest Companion was published in 1995.  There was no indication of physical intimacy, but she called FDR “M.F.” (My Franklin).

Both Daisy and Lucy were with FDR at Warm Spring, Georgia (FDR’s winter White House) when he was stricken with cerebral hemorrhage, which was a sudden, abrupt and unexpected event.  But, based on what I read in Closest Companion and FDR and Lucy: Lovers and Friends, FDR was quite a sick man the last five months of his life.

We read Daisy’s diary on January 12, 1945,

“Lucy (my new “cousin”) came up on the train with him [FDR], so he had a nice long morning in which to talk with her—She is such a lovely person, a very real ‘old friend’.”  She & I have one very big thing in common: our unselfish devotion to F. [Franklin] He got on his chair & I wheeled him around, while he showed Lucy a few things she had not seen before.  . . I took myself off as soon as I had finished my coffee, so they could talk . . .”

FDR was often tired and weak and apparently looked sick to those around him.  Both Daisy and Lucy were very worried when FDR went for his last meeting with Stalin and Churchill (Yalta Conference, Feb. 7-11. 1945).  FDR indeed looked tired and unhealthy.  Daisy had to prepare gruel for him every day.  Both Daisy and Lucy were so concerned about FDR’s health, “got to the point of literally weeping on each other’s shoulder.”

FDR and Lucy saw each other on many occasions during the last five months of his life, but the relationship was not that of a sensual or lascivious one.  Some of the meeting was arranged by FDR’s daughter, Anna, who recalled, “There was never anything clandestine about these occasions, on the contrary there were occasions which I welcomed for my father because they were lighthearted and gay, affording a few hours of much needed relaxation for a beloved father and world leader in a time of crisis . . . Lucy was a wonderful person, and I was grateful to her.”

There was a book published in 1982 (“Mother and Daughter: The Letters of Eleanor and Anna Roosevelt”) in which revealed mother (Eleanor) was very unhappy about what Anna did.

Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic force                                                                              God created only four forces that we came to know in the universe: (1) gravity, (2) electromagnetism, (3) strong nuclear force, and (4) weak nuclear force, which is responsible for radioactive decay.

Newton discovered the gravity and Faraday electromagnetism; both should be in the same league and of the same caliber, although Newton invented calculus (the credit should be shared with Leibniz admittedly) whereas Faraday is mathematically ignorant.  Like Lincoln, Faraday had no formal schooling.

My limited math/calculus background precluded me from fully understanding the Nobel lectures concerning electromagnetism; that of Paul Dirac (1933), Richard Feynman (1965) and Roy Glauber (2005)—I recall Glauber still went to his physics class at Harvard the morning after he received the call from Stockholm at age of 80 in 2005; he is now 91.

Reading Faraday’s work poses no such problem as he is mathematically challenged.  This is why I am reading “Lavoisier Fourier Faraday” (Great Books of the Western World 45). I read his “On the Induction of Electrical Currents” and “On the Evolution of Electricity from Magnetism” without a single math formula.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire                                                                                         I am reading Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of The Roman Empire (eBook and abridged edition).  I took out the Volume 1 of the three-volume version in case I feel like reading the complete set.

If one is a history buff and doesn’t Gibbon; it is like one is a play lover and never read Shakespeare.  I probably will never read any other book by Gibbon; in fact, I don’t even know what other books he ever wrote.  Edward Gibbon is almost synonymous to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, just like J.D. Salinger is synonymous to The Rye in the Catcher.  They are inseparable.  People got an impression that the respective book was the only book they ever wrote.

Hamilton: The illustrated Biography                                     Reading Hamilton is not my top priority at present, but I just couldn’t resist the temptation of buying the book when I spotted it 50% discount at barnes & noble the other day.

Jo has been a Hamilton enthusiast since she and Sean went to see Broadway musical Hamilton in Chicago last year.  It must be ‘contagious’ as Gabby obviously also has turned into a Hamilton enthusiast.  It is time for me to hit the book, lest Gabby would know more about Hamilton than I do.

Middlemarch                                                                      Last but not the least, ‘studying’ Middlemarch is always an ongoing project.  I am reading the kindle book version; the print book is for ‘display’ only. I have finished reading “George Eliot in Love”, a borrowed book from Carnegie Library.

Let this post serve as a Thank You note for Gloria and Tom; they now cannot say I didn’t take time to write a Thank You note.

A great, great American jewel, world jewel”: The press is against me!

As we all know that Donald Trump won the Presidential election, running a campaign against Democrats, Republicans and the press.  Trump was not the original; Linus in Peanuts lamented “The press is against me!” many years ago.

In addition to the many books and ebook I received from my daughters and good friend for Christmas gifts, I also receive a one-year gift subscription of the New York Times (digital version).  I have been exploring its rich resources that have more than 13 million articles since 1851, or shall I say since “the beginning of the Times”.

There has been a tremendous surge of the digital subscriptions to the New York Times since the election of Donald Trump.  The number is top 10,000 a day, in contrast to 600 a day previously.  The theory is that people wish to support someone or something that can stand up President Donald Trump (in less than a day he will be). 

I began to read New York Times (“a great, great American jewel, world jewel,” as Trump would say) in 1972 when I began my residency training in New Jersey.  For many years I subscribed the Times after moving to Waynesburg in 1975, at which time the print papers would come a day or two late, and that was long before the digital age.

The New York Times currently has more than 2.5 million subscribers, including the 1.1 million Sunday print papers; the daily print papers have since shrunk to about 600,000 now. With the success of the digital subscriptions, it looks like this great American institution will survive to years to come.

Why I am switching from Print Book Reading to eReading?

In a NY Times Book Review (12/15/16), it takes the form of interviewing with the author, Steve Johnson.  One of the questions is:

Do you like reading on paper or electronic?

I always prefer electronic when I am doing research because I have an elaborate system that I’ve been tinkering with over the years for digitally capturing and storing important quotes from anything I read. There are a number of studies showing that readers have better recall when they read in print, but the problem with print is that it’s not searchable. On my computer today, I can find quotes from books that I read almost 20 years ago in a matter of seconds. And those searches are constantly surprising me with interesting connections or long-forgotten threads.

I wrote the following on a post talking about print books and eBooks at Sermo [a physician-only online site] on 2/21/11,

“Browsing in the libraries or bookstores or holding a book in hands is a joy in life, and that is why I am still resisting eReaders. But, I know in the bottom of my heart, its onslaught is inexorable and irresistible; for me to fall for it is when, not if. Rumor had it that my daughters are conspiring to get me an eReader whether I like it or not. They’re confident that I may hook on NOOKcolor, or the Kindle and may kindle my interest of reading other stuff; but my eyes are on iPad; more versatile, . . . .”

That was 2011, now more than half of my book readings are digital (laptops, iPads, Kindle Fire HD 6 and 8, iPhone, iMac, etc.)  The main reason of switching over is exactly like what Steve Johnson said, “I have an elaborate system that I’ve been tinkering with over the years for digitally capturing and storing important quotes from anything I read.”

I myself do have an elaborate system, using FileMaker file.  I constantly look for a better way so I can retrieve the info (data) I store at a click years from now.  One of the Christmas “loots” I got from the family is a Classic Quotes tote of “I cannot live without books” (by Thomas Jefferson).  Shall I say “I cannot live without FileMaker”?

While writing a letter-to-the-editor in 2010, I wanted to use a quote from Mark Twain that I recall reading it in a book about American language by H.L. Mencken 20-30 years ago.  I had to check the book out from Waynesburg University and spent more time locating the quote than that I wrote the letter.  If it were stored in my FileMaker file, I could get it at a click.

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2010/11/or-may-not-be-as-easy-as-you-thought.html

What I got from Amazon Black Friday sales

About one month ago I checked out (from Carnegie Library) Vincent DeVita Jr.’s The Death of Cancer that rekindled my interest in the history of medicine, in this case the history of cancer, and that led me to Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.  I am currently on the waiting list of this book on the OverDrive—Carnegie Library or libraries across the country ebook borrowing.

I apparently couldn’t wait and bought these two books, taking advantage of Amazon’s Black Friday’s book sale. The books arrived today.  I almost finished reading The Death of Cancer.  Many of the books I bought were the ones I checked out from libraries.  This is the reason why I do not always read the books I bought.  But this is the book I need to own.

Many years ago Janice first introduced Atul Gawande to me, it was his Better, and I have since read his Complications, The Checklist Manifesto, Being Mortal. Now I am introducing Siddhartha Mukherjee to Janice; it will be well worth her while.

I recently discovered another immigrant-author in medical field (both Gawande and Mukherjee are from India; Gawande is the child of an immigrant urologist). Mukherjee is Stanford U., Oxford U. and Harvard Medical School/MGH trained immunologist-oncologist.  He worked in Paul Berg’s Lab while an undergraduate at Stanford.

I am currently going through the archives of articles in Scientific American in the field of the advance of cancer treatments.  I came across this article of “Leukemia”, written by Dr. Emil Frei and Dr. Emil Freireich (about whom I am writing a post) on the issue of May 1, 1964. Who would have more knowledge and insight to leukemia than these two pioneer oncologists in 1960s?  They shared the 1972 Lasker Awards (the American Nobel) in 1972.

Dr. Emil Frei was the uncle of one of our good friends, through whose kind arrangement, Janice, during her freshman year, was fortunate to be invited to a party hosted by Dr. (and Mrs.) Emil Frei, who was then physician-in-chief at Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

In addition to these two books, what I got from Amazon Black Friday “Fire Sale” was Kindle Fire HD 8; the third Kindle I have; two are still on active duty, not mentioning iPad, mini iPad and iPhone.  With more than half of my readings are on various devices nowadays, I still cannot part with the joy of buying print books, not that I will read all of them.

The tale of two books: One cannot put down, the other cannot pick up

I checked out two books from Carnegie Library last week.  One is “The death of cancer by Dr. Vincent DeVita; the other “Marlborough: His life and times” by Churchill.  It turned out I cannot put down the first book (too fascinating) and nor can I pick up the second (over 1,000 pages just for Book Two, literally too heavy).

One of my ambitions is to read “almost” everything Churchill wrote, it is time to read “Marlborough” (whose name is John Churchill, Winston’s ancestor). On our last London/Paris trip, Blenheim Palace (commemorating Duke Marlborough’s triumph at the Battle of Blenheim) was on the itinerary until we decided to take a side trip to Paris.  Churchill was actually born in Blenheim Palace, as his American mother was still whirling and dancing in a party there the night when he was born.

As you know Churchill and FDR had more than 1,500 correspondences during the war.  FDR sent the first letter to Churchill on 9/11/1939, it began with

 “My dear Churchill: It is because you and I occupied similar positions in the World War [WWI]  that I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty.. . .I shall at all times welcome it, if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about. . . I am glad you did the Marlboro [Marlborough] volumes before the thing started--and I much enjoyed reading them.” 

FDR even misspelled Marlborough (he either smoked too much or watched too much cigarette ad), and I doubted he actually finished reading the book.

The one I checked out is Book Two, more than 1,000 pages (the library doesn’t have Book One).  They do have a 4-volume set, but they are so “out of shape”.

I will have a lot to say about Vincent DeVita’s “The death of cancer” later.  Dr. DeVita was credited for the development of combination chemotherapy (MOPP, a four-drug regimen) that cured most patients with Hodgkin lymphoma and I believe, anaplastic large cell lymphoma.

As you know the pitcher, Jon Lester, is going to the World Series beginning tomorrow (Oct. 25).  As a rookie pitcher for Boston Red Sox in 2006 he was struck by anaplastic large cell lymphoma and was cured by chemotherapy.  I still recall vividly watching his pitching upon returning to the field; his parents were there too.  He threw a complete game (one hitter, no walk, facing only 28 batters) in 2013 and helped Red Sox to get the World Series champion in 2013.  Lester went to Chicago Cubs ($155 million 6-year contract) in December 2014.  And this is the survivor of lymphoma.

It was hilarious to watch Chicago Cubs to clinch the NL Champion to go to the World Series at Wiggly Field last Friday.  The last time the Cubs was World Series Champion was 1908, more than 100 years ago. Let’s Go, Cubs!

Dr. DeVita is brutally honest, thus making the story of war on cancer fascinating.  He once was the director of National Cancer Institute and the chief-physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.  With his illustrious career he has a lot to say and he “tells it like it is”.

The book is written for the general public and it is extremely successful in this aspect, I would give the credit to the co-author, Dr. DeVita’s daughter, Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn, a science writer.

I am more than half way through The Death of Cancer and only 40 pages into Marlborough.  Not that I don’t like writing, but that I like/need reading more.

How immigrants learn English

I just finished reading a memoir by Jan Vilcek with a title of “Love and Science”. A familiar story of Jewish scientist, escaping not only from Nazi, but also from communist Czechoslovakia.

I always have difficulty saying or spelling Czechoslovakia, but I am not alone; as Churchill once said, “To English ears the name of Czechoslovakia sounds outlandish”.

Jan Vilcek made a fortune by receiving the royalty from Remicade (the first tumor necrosis factor inhibitor approved by FDA).  He has a chapter talking about the contributions (esp in bio-medicine) from the immigrants like himself.  Vilcek Foundation has Vilcek Prizes for the immigrants who have great contribution in science and art—his wife is an art historian, spending her career at NYC Metropolitan Museum. 

Someone should tell Trump it was the immigrants that made the America great in the first place and it is still happening.

  

He has given more than $120 million (still counting as it was a portion of the royalty from Remicade) to NYU that gave him a position when he defected from Czechoslovakia in 1965 (only 6 years before I came to the States).

Dr. Vilcek’s (an M.D. PhD.) main interests of research were interferon and tumor necrosis factor, about which I began to read a few articles in Scientific American (more about this later).

A few years after I came to the States, I realized in order to survive or even excel in my adopted country I needed to have a good command of English.  I made a radical decision that I’ll read and write in English only, practically giving up Chinese, then I discovered the beauty of English language somewhere along the line.

I am glad to read that Dr. Jan Vilcek and his wife also made the same radical decision in the issue of language; the only difference is that they focused on the spoken English, mine written one.

The followings are the excerpts from “Love and Science: a memoir”

One day, in our third or fourth year in New York, Marica [Jan Vilcek’s wife] and I made a radical decision.  From that day on we would no longer speak to each other in Slovak.  We were going to converse only in English.  We made this decision because—not unlike other immigrants—in our conversations we started mixing Slovak and English words, creating our own version of “Slovlish,” and we disliked that.  We wanted to improve our English vocabularies, to learn to communicate on a more sophisticated level in our adopted language, and we felt that we could achieve these goals more effectively if we switched completely to English.

The first weeks of implementation of our English-only policy were difficult—it seemed so unnatural for the two of us to communicate in English that we would frequently slip back into Slovak.  Over time we get used to it.  I even forced myself to do sums in English, and to my surprise, after a while it became perfectly natural.  Then one day I realized that I was thinking in English, and when I spoke in Slovak to someone I would mentally translate from English into Slovak—not the other way around—and come up with sentence structures that sounded odd in my native tongue.  After a few more years, I realized that I was dreaming in English—with a Central European accent, of course!

The gift of books to a gardener and a Taiwanese-American-Anglophile

Janice and Joy brought home my birthday gifts from my three girls, including 3 books and a book bag from Barnes & Noble with an inscription of “A book is like a garden carried in a pocket” among many others.  What we cultivate in the garden is not just flowers and veggies, but also mind.  To read a book is like to cultivate a garden, one expects the growth and harvesting of the mind.

All the books carry inscriptions that please and entertain me.  I would like to share the inscriptions with you.

The inscription on the book of “The collected poems of Emily Dickinson” is

“May Dickinson’s words weave

  a web of garden inspiration,

When winter gives reprieve

  from summer perspiration.”

The inscription on the book of “The complete Peanuts” is

“To the man who taught us
  to start the day with a
  good laugh –

            Happy 70^th Birthday !!

                   Love,
                         Joy, Janice & Jo”

The inscription on the book of “Tudors” is

“His knowledge of this English past
  is so through and so vast
  ‘Tis true! This Taiwanese-American-Anglophile
   is an honorary Brit of that other Isle”

(Now I still have to write a Thank You note to those who took time to celebrate my birthday with me.  The party for which I was not responsible to arrange; it was a surprise to me; I think the conspirators were Janet and Katy.)

Flirting with French

Reading the sample of a book is one way to decide whether to check it out or place a hold.  When I read the following paragraph, I placed a hold on Flirting with French.

A rainy afternoon with my wife at a Left Bank brasserie, watching the city scurry home, the drizzly streets an impressionist canvas come to life, Anne and I drunk on cold beer, on Paris, on love, happy as happy gets, neither of us speaking much, just enjoying the scene and realizing how lucky we are to love the same things, and Paris, and each other.

“. . . how lucky we are to love the same things, and Paris, and each other.”  Katy and I are not that lucky to love the same thing, which may not be entirely unfortunate, lest she might be as boring as I am, talking about history (dead people and things happened long ago) or Higgs boson.

But we strive to do the same thing (gardening) and go to the same places.  Last Friday (no office for Good Friday) we went to Monroeville for a “lady out” lunch; only a few “brave” husbands showed up.  One lady was surprised to see me; I said I am “丈夫兼車夫， 又兼大夫，在家是農夫” (I am the husband and the chauffeur, as well as the doctor, and I am the farmer at home.)

One needs to know some Chinese to appreciate this: every word (term) ends with a “夫”.

丈夫 (husband)

車夫  (chauffeur)

大夫  (doctor)

農夫  (farmer)

If you want to borrow ebooks, place a hold and wait

To borrow ebook is easy, just a click away.  Or so I thought.  Each ebook the library purchased can only be borrowed by one person at a given time, just like the print book.  It is less competitive to check out the print books as fewer people would take the trouble going to the library. 

One can check out 10 books and place a hold on another 10 books.  One can click and check out 10 books in no time at the comfort of one’s home.  No wonder most of the books I want are not available. 

I am No. 3 for one copy of Flirting with French; that would be 6 to 9 weeks wait.  I will wait as long for Elie Wiesel’s Night (No. 6 for 2 copies).  Carnegie Library has 17 copies of Being Mortal by Atul Gawanda, but I am the No. 31.

Having read Atul Gawanda’s Better, Complications and The Checklist Manifesto, I just have to read his Being Mortal.  Dr. Gawanda did have a thing or two to say about medicine.   I recall Janice gave me the book Better some years ago.  I should be the one brought to her attention for book like this, not the other way around.  The cover of The Checklist Manifesto looks like from Nike.

The solution of this problem is to limit the number of borrowed books to five at any given time.  Or even three if I have my way.

Anglophile and Francophile

After coming back from London and Paris trip last September I have been listening to BBC radio every day. And all my non-medical readings focus on WWI and French Revolution.  I am reading John Keegan’s and Martin Gilbert’s The First World War concurrently.  Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is the iBook on my iPad.

They are all British or Scottish authors; no wonder my daughters call me Anglophile.  Janice even asked why I came to America, instead of England forty some years ago.  I said it was the same reason why Europeans went to Paris during Louis XIV’s reign.

The following is from Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization.

“Foreigners came to Paris as to a finishing school for all graces of body and mind.  Thousands of Italians, Germans, even Englishmen, preferred Paris to their native lands.”

By the way Churchill is a Francophile who saw that country “as being synonymous with civilization.”

The Majestic Closer—Mariano Rivera

While reading a book yesterday I “swiped” the page and the page didn’t turn; too much digital reading! I finished reading the iBook of DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover last week and more than half way through The Closer—autobiography of the Closer, who else? Mariano Rivera.

No discussion of Lady C’s Lover as I try not to talk about anything controversial, although I believe in DH Lawrence when he wrote Lady Ottoline Morrell , “About Lady C.—you must not think I advocate perpetual sex.  Far from it.  Nothing nauseates me more than promiscuous sex in and out of season.  But, I want, with Lady C. to make an adjustment in consciousness to the basic physical realties. . . .”

It is much less fun to watch Yankees without the majestic Mariano Rivera to close the game and Derek Jeter, the Captain.

If one watches baseball often enough, one cannot help but admire the strength and skill of the arm and hand of a pitcher.  I often time wonder how they can perform under the enormous pressure when the stake was so high.

Rivera apparently drew the strength from the Lord Almighty.  Standing alone on the mound he felt the overpowering presence of the Holy Spirit and that “He is the one who is all-powerful, not me”.  He writes as if he were a preacher.

Yankees picked the guitar riffs of “Enter Sandman” whenever Rivera was called to enter the field, he would recite his prayer,

“Lord, please keep me safe. Keep my teammates safe, and everybody safe. I pray that You will protect me and give me the strength I need. Amen!”

He said if he had his choice he would pick “Onward Christian Soldiers”.

FDR and Churchill singing  “Onward Christian Soldiers”.on the Prince of Wales 8/10/1941

When FDR and Churchill first met on August 10, 1941 they sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” during the service on boarding The Prince of Wales; it was reported that Churchill wept taking a handkerchief from his pocket.

Mariano Rivera and Derek Jeter played together in Yankees minor league teams; Jeter was promoted to the Major League (MLB) a few months after Rivera did and they were sent back to the minor league the same day.  A star was not born overnight.  Rivera spent 5 years in the Minor League.

I am surprised to learn how he obtained his famous ‘cutter” (a cut fastball).  From a small boy in a small fishing village in Panama to the Yankees stardom.  What a career, what a life!

The Kindle book of The Closer is a gift from my daughters, who know the father best.

50 Brilliant Minds of the Last 100 Years?

I came across a new book of “50 Brilliant Minds of the Last 100 Years”; any one can come up with one’s own list. Besides, how one defines “brilliant” mind?

I agree with many of the choices, the likes of Max Planck, Einstein, Thomas Edison, Enrico Fermi, Stephen Hawking, Niels Bohr, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.  But, I would remove as many.

I have a neutral position on many, too. Noam Chomsky is on the list, I am sure, for his achievement on linguistics.  Only Edwin can appreciate him.  Understanding is the thing, one can only love and appreciate one understands.  Understanding intensifies and enhances the enjoyment.  I don't know enough linguistics to say whether Chomsky deserves on the list or not.

Chomsky is also one of the most famous and most radical American dissenters.  But that was not why he is on the list.

I have been talking about Lady Ottoline Morrell since I “bumped into” her house at Gower Street in London. Three of her frequent visitors are also on the list: D.H. Lawrence, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes.  Pictures were taken by Lady Ottoline.

To say her house was the most intellectual salon is not an over statement.

Ottoline's house we bumped into

D.H. Lawrence

No country for old men: W.B. Yeats, Murray Gell-Mann, Cormac McCarthy and Ottoline

In the spirit of reading book whose author is still living I read Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men this week.  He was recommended to me by Janice last year.  I regret I cannot sing my high praise.  Knowing who McCarthy is; I wonder the problem probably lies in me.  Either I have to re-read or better yet try his “All the Pretty Horses”.

I have to say he writes well; the style reminiscent to Hemingway’s, using subject and verb only, let out adjective.  The plots are good in the first three-quarters, but the end disappoints me.  He leaves the psychopath Chigurh still at large and Sheriff Bell retires, sort of a symbol of “defeat”.

The plots and endings in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms are much more intrigue and powerful.

The book title of “No Country for Old Men” comes from W.B. Yeats’s famous poem, Sailing to Byzantium (by the way, Yeats—another Nobel laureate in Literature also frequented Ottoline Morrell’s house).  Nothing in plot, theme or ending fits the line of “No country for old men”—the opening line for the poem.  Philip Roth’s “The Dying Animal” also comes from the line of this poem, as does a book called “The young in one another’s arms”.

Cormac McCarthy and particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann are longtime friends, so he must be a man of something.  Gell-Mann was awarded Germany’s most prestigious Helmholtz Medal in September 2014.  Following the presentation at Santa Fe Institute, the toast was led by Cormack McCarthy.  Reading my post about Gell-Mann will be worth your while.

“Quark and Murray Gell-Mann, a Renaissance man in science”

http://doctorjytsai.blogspot.com/2012/01/quark-and-murray-gell-mann-renaissance.html

Murray Gell-Mann on 9/26/2014

 

It is time to read Gabriel García Márquez

I read A Catcher in the Rye only after J.D. Salinger died in 2010.  I began to read John Updike in 2008, and he died within one year in January 2009.  Most of the books I have read whose authors had been gone long ago.  My daughters suggested me to read One hundred Years of Solitude, but I never did.  I picked up Love in the Time of Cholera last year.  It is time for me to read Gabriel García Márquez; to finish Love in the Time of Cholera and also to read One hundred Years of Solitude as he passed away on April 17.

Over the years I only read books written by American and British authors; Janice kept assuring me that the translation versions of great novels are as good as the original English ones.  Based on reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (still an ongoing ‘open book’ for me) and Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, I think Janice is right.

A New York Times article says “he read intensely — the Americans Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain and Melville; the Europeans Dickens, Tolstoy, Proust, Kafka and Virginia Woolf.” But Márquez once said, “I’ve never tried to imitate authors I’ve admired. On the contrary, I’ve done all I could not to imitate them.”  This may be why he is an original in perfecting the “magic realism” style.  It is safe to say that he has the caliber of the likes of Dickens, Tolstoy and Hemingway.

He was politically left-winged; a good friend of Fidel Castro, who may be a lesser of two evils comparing with the Latin America’s dictators, such as General Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

A house without books is bare, empty, dull and lonely

Janice said she is trying to unload some of her books as she has been collecting digital books, moving to invisible “digital clutter”.  I am beginning to order digital books from time to time here and there, but I just cannot let go my books.  A house without books is bare, empty, dull and lonely.

Katy needs more space with plant fluorescent lights, I have to move the books to make room for the young plants; one got to have priority.  One can see the pile of Churchill books is higher than that of Lincoln, and I am beginning to have Churchill digital books.

The only reason I do not like gardening is I cannot read while working in the garden.  I think I need a Google Glass.  Google has expanded the so-called Glass explorers to 8,000, but I’m not willing to spend $1,500 for a prototype.

Kindle edition eBook, iBook and the “cloud”

I purchased a Kindle edition eBook (“The Missing Manual of FileMaker Pro 12”) online, downloaded to my iPad mini initially.  I asked Janice as to how to read it in my Kindle Fire or Dell laptop; she asked me to look for the “cloud”, it should be there waiting to be downloaded.  I went to Dell laptop and  there it is; there is indeed a “cloud” on my desktop; except it was the omnipresent weather report/forecast  (see photo).

I found the “Cloud” in my Kindle Fire and downloaded it.  I also found the Kindle app (see photo)  in the Dell laptop and downloaded it.

I initially couldn’t find the “Missing Manual” in my iPad 2, then I realized I was looking at the iBook library, little did I know it was sitting in the Kindle book library.

I’ll also put it in the iMac and iPhone 5s, so I can read the “Missing Manual” in six different devices; I feel like buying six copies of the same book, paying one price.

I am practically reading eBook (Amazon Kindle edition) and iBook (Apple Store) everyday, even though I still like having a book in hand—an “old flame” I wouldn’t give it up.  The feature of being able to read across various devices may put the eBook/iBook in the upper hand for the battle of reading eBook/iBook and reading the print ones, I am afraid.

If money is not the issue, doing both for the same book would be having the best of the two worlds.

Two great French men, one great friendship: Albert Camus and Jacques Monod

Albert Camus

Today (January 4) in 1960 Albert Camus died of automobile accident, only three years after he was awarded with a Nobel Prize in literature; his life was cut short at 46 years of age.  A great loss to the world.  Not only did we lose this great French literary figure, but also a great political activist and human right advocate.  A world would be a better one with him in it.

Last month I came across a book by the name of The Brave Genius of Albert Camus and Jacques Monod: From the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize.  I admire and read these two French men for years (for Camus’s novels, I only read The Plague), but was never aware that both men will be the same topic of a book.

Jacques Monod, along with Francois Jacob and Andre Lwoff were awarded Nobel Prize in medicine in 1965 for the discovery of “genetic control of enzymes and viral synthesis”.  Students of genetics or molecular biology should know how important this discovery is.  It is about a repressor binds to an operator (a genetic switch that controls the activity of a nearby gene) and thus inhibits gene expression.

Let me digress to say something about Walter (Wally by his friends) Gilbert, who isolated Lac repressor in 1966 and succeeded in showing the binding of the Lac repressor to the lac operator in 1967. Monod and Jacob proposed their model of gene control in 1960.  Wally Gilbert eventually got a Nobel Prize for his way of sequencing nucleic acid (DNA), shared with Fred Sanger, who just passed away at age of 95 in November 2013.  Gilbert is a Harvard U and Cambridge U-trained physicist-turn-to-biologist because of James Watson. He also co-founded Biogen and Myriad Genetics bio-tech companies.  He is extraordinary modest.

Jacques Monod

It turns out that Albert Camus and Jacques Monod were good friends.  Both were active (in leadership position) in the French Resistance under Nazi’s occupation during WWII.  The Nazi/French policemen once searched Monod’s Lab looking for evidence, but left quickly; it was said those policemen apparently didn’t like the smell of Monod’s Lab.

They never met during the war; they were introduced at a meeting of human rights group shortly after the war and hit it off immediately.  The “Brave Genius” book states that “Monod emerged as a new incarnation of his friend Camus [after his untimely death], albeit in a lab coat.”

It was also Monod to introduce Martin Luther King Jr’s during his Paris visit in March 1966.  It would have been Albert Camus to do the introduction, had he not been killed in 1960.  After Dr. King’s assassination in 1968, Monod eulogized King, comparing King to Gandhi.

This great friendship was apparently little known.  Camus was not mentioned in Monod’s Wikipedia biography and Monod was not mentioned in Camus’.

In The New York Times obituary of Monod, one reads “Monod said his own values were based on the existentialist ethics of his friend the late Albert Camus—‘an ethics based on free choice’--and he denied that his intention was to create a philosophy of pessimism or despair.”  This was talking about Monod’s book, Chance and Necessity.  Two great French men, one great friendship.