190. SHAKESPEARE: The World as Stage

Bill Bryson 2007

The Book Jacket Blurb:

    William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.
    Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays. Emulating the style of his famous travelogues, Bryson records episodes in his research, including a visit to a bunkerlike room in Washington, D.C., where the world's largest collection of First Folios is housed.
    Bryson celebrates Shakespeare as a writer of unimaginable talent and enormous inventiveness, a coiner of phrases ("vanish into thin air,""foregone conclusion,""one fell swoop") that even today have common currency. His Shakespeare is like no one else's -- the beneficiary of Bryson's genial nature, his engaging skepticism, and a gift for storytelling unrivaled in our time.

What Hooked Me:

There is no better author to make the daunting task of relating William Shakespeare's life so reader-friendly than Bill Bryson. The author's ever enlightening, organized and systematic telling of major known occurrences in Shakespeare's life, the 17th century England (and interesting people) of his days, and his enormous contributions to literature and the English language itself is highly satisfying.

The Quotes:

'Before he came into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.'(opening lines)

'So we are in the curious position with William Shakespeare of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren't very good by artists working years after his death and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be someone else altogether. The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don't really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: He is at once the best known and least known of figures.'(7)

'It is because we have so much of Shakespeare's work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, lighthearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things -- as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.'(19)

'Shakespeare's early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed.'(44)

'Shakespeare's genius had to do not really with facts, but with ambition, intrigue, love, suffering -- things that aren't taught in school. He had a kind of assimilative intelligence, which allowed him to pull together lots of disparate fragments of knowledge, but there is almost nothing that speaks of hard intellectual application in his plays -- unlike, say, those of Ben Johnson, where learning hangs like burning on every word.'(109)

'Anyway, and obviously, it wasn't so much a matter of how many words he used, but what he did with them -- and no one has ever done more. It is often said that what sets Shakespeare apart is his ability to illuminate the workings of the soul and so on, and he does that superbly, goodness knows, but what really characterizes his work -- every bit of it, in poems and plays and even dedications, throughout every portion of his career -- is a positive and palpable appreciation of the transfixing power of language. A Midsummer Night's Dream remains an enchanting work after four hundred years, but few would argue that it cuts to the very heart of human behavior. What it does do is take, and give, a positive satisfaction in the joyous possibilities of verbal expression.'(110)

'He coined -- or, to be more carefully precise, made the first recorded use of -- 2,035 words, and interestingly he indulged the practice from the very outset of his career.  Titus Andronicus and Love's Labour Lost, two of his earliest works, have 140 new words between them.'(113)

'Among the words first found in Shakespeare are abstemious, antipathy, critical, frugal, dwindle, extract, horrid, vast, hereditary, critical, excellent, eventful, barefaced, assassination, lonely, leapfrog, indistinguishable, well-read, zany, and countless others (including countless). Where would be without them?'(114)

'His real gift was as a phrasemaker. "Shakespeare's language," says Stanley Wells, "has the quality, difficult to define, of memorability that has caused many phrases to enter the common language." Among them: one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, bag and baggage, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, to be in a pickle, budge an inch, the milk of human kindness, more sinned against than sinning, remembrance of things past, beggar all description, cold comfort, to thine own self be true, more in sorrow than in anger, the wish is father to the thought, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, be cruel to be kind, blinking idiot, with bated breath, tower of strength, pomp and circumstance, foregone conclusion -- and many others so repetitiously irresistible that we have debased them into cliches.'(115)

'After his death William Shakespeare was laid to rest in the chancel of Holy Trinity, a large, lovely church beside Avon. As we might by now expect, his life concludes with a mystery -- indeed, with a small series of them. His gravestone bears no name, but merely a curious piece of doggerel:

Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbeare,

To digg the dust encloased heare.

Bleste be the man that spares the stones

And curst be he that moves the bones.'(178)

'There is an extraordinary -- seemingly an insatiable -- urge on the part of quite a number of people to believe that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by someone other that William Shakespeare. The number of published books suggesting -- or more often insisting -- as much is estimated now to be well over five thousand.'(181)

'When we reflect upon the works of William Shakespeare it is of course an amazement to consider that one man could have produced such a sumptuous, wise, varied, thrilling, ever-delighting body of work, but that it is of course the hallmark of genius. Only one man had the circumstances and gifts to give such incomparable works, and William Shakespeare of Stratford was unquestionably that man -- whoever he was.'(closing lines)

HarperCollins First Edition book
196 pages
Book borrowed from the library
Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

188. the IMMORTAL LIFE of HENRIETTA LACKS

Rebecca Skloot 2010

The Book Jacket Blurb:

     Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells -- taken without her knowledge -- became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they'd weigh more than 50 million metric tons -- as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.
     Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.
     Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the "colored" ward of John Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells, from Henrietta's small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia -- a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo -- to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.
     Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had lanched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family -- past and present -- is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.
     Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family -- especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother's cells. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?

What Hooked Me:

Remarkably written, Henrietta's story is one that I should know... we ALL should know it!!

The Quotes:

'There's a photo on my wall of a woman I've never met, its left corner torn and patched together with tape. She looks straight into the camera and smiles, hands on hips, dress suit neatly pressed, lips painted deep red. It's the late 1940s and she hasn't yet reached the age of thirty. Her light brown skin is smooth, her eyes still young and playful, oblivious to the tumor growing inside her -- a tumor that would leave her five children motherless and change the future of medicine. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is "Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson."'(opening lines)

'After three straight days of grilling, Patillo finally decided to give me Deborah's phone number. But first, he said, there were a few things I needed to know. He lowered his voice and rattled off a list of dos and dont's for dealing with Deborah Lacks: Don't be aggressive. Do be honest. Don't be clinical, don't try to force her into anything, don't talk down to her, she hates that. Do be compassionate, don't forget that she's been through a lot with these cells, do have patience. "You'll need that more than anything," he told me.'(51)

'He sent shipments of HeLa cells to researchers in Texas, India, New York, Amsterdam, and many places in between. Those researchers gave them to more researchers, who gave them to more still. Henrietta's cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules. As Gey flew from one lab to another, demonstrating his culturing techniques and helping to set up new laboratories, he always flew with tubes of Henrietta's cells in his breast pocket.'(57)

'Not long after Henrietta's death, planning began for a HeLa factory -- a massive operation that would grow to produce trillions of HeLa cells each week. It was built for one reason: to help stop polio.'(93)

'Scientists knew they had to keep their cultures free from bacterial and viral contamination, and they knew it was possible for cells to contaminate one another if they got mixed up in culture. But when it came to HeLa, they had no idea what they were up against. It turned out Henrietta's cells could float through the air on dust particles. They could travel from one culture to the next on unwashed hands or used pipettes; they could ride from lab to lab on researchers' coats and shoes, or through ventilation systems. And they were stong: if just one HeLa cell landed in a culture dish, it took over, consuming all the media and filling all the space.(153)

"You know what is a myth?" Bobette snapped from the recliner. "Everybody always saying Henrietta Lacks donated these cells. She didn't donate anything. They took them and didn't ask." She inhaled a deep breath to calm herself. "What really would upset Henrietta is the fact that Dr. Gey never told the family anything -- we didn't know nothing about those cells and he didn't care. That just rubbed us the wrong way. I just keep asking everybody, 'Why didn't they say anything to the family?' They knew how to contact us. If Dr. Gey wasn't dead, I think I would have killed him myself."(169)

'When I talked to Howard Jones fifty years after he found the tumor on Henrietta's cervix, he was in his early nineties and had seen thousands of cervical cancer cases. But whan I asked if he remembered Henrietta, he laughed. "I could never forget that tumor," he said, "Because it was unlike anything I've ever seen."
I talked to many scientists about HeLa, and none could explain why Henrietta's cells grew so powerfully when so many others didn't even survive. Today it's possible for scientists to immortalize cells by exposing them to certain viruses or chemical, but very few cells have become immortal on their own as Henrietta's did.'(213)

'Cristoph taught Deborah and Zakariyya how to use the microscope, saying, "Look through this ... take your glasses off ... now turn this knob to focus." Finally the cells popped into view for Deborah. And through the microscope, for that moment, all she could see was an ocean of her mother's cells, stained an ethereal fluorescent green.(266)

(Images from Google search)

 'They're beautiful," she whispered, then went back to staring at the slide in silence. Eventually, without looking away from the cells, she said, "God, I never thought I'd see my mother under a microscope -- I never dreamed this day would ever come."(266)

 'As we left Cronsville, Deborah thanked Lurz for the information, saying, "I've been waiting for this a long, long time, Doc." When asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, "Like I'm always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you can't do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, times was different."'(276)

'In that moment, reading those passages, I understood completely how some Lackses could believe, without doubt, that Henrietta had been chosen by the Lord to become an immortal being. If you believe the Bible is the liberal truth, the immortality of Henrietta's cells makes perfect sense. Of course they were growing and surviving decades after her death, of course they floated through the air, and of course, they'd led to cures for diseases and been launched into space. Angels are like that. The Bible tells us so.'(296)

Crown Publishing Edition

310 pages

Book borrowed from the library

Book qualifies for: 100+ Reading Challenge

141. SCHINDLER'S LIST

Thomas Keneally 1982

An astonishing book about an astonishing man. The writer uses vivid and often horrifying personal accounts from many Schindler survivors to effectively present an authentic fictionalized memoir of  Oskar Schindler and his personal fight to save many Jews from the death camps during the Holocaust. Beneath the carefree gambling, drinking and womanizing facade was the heart of a just, sympathetic, righteous and fearless man who cunningly manipulated the ranks of evil Nazi officers for his remarkable cause. 

'In Poland's deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and -- in the lapel of the dinner jacket -- a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.'(opening lines)

'So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, and with a figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.'(29)

'Destiny, said Herr Schindler senior, was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point.'(39)

'Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.'(48)

'Then without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, "You'll be safe working here. If you work here, then you'll live through the war."... The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so  much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.'(91-92)

'Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and odds weren't good.'(92)

'The chambers of Belzec, Schindler found out from his source had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner's testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity. Crematoria were under construction, lest old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses put a brake on the new killing method.'(136)

'Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn't know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.'(178)

'From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer that truth itself.... Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double faced -- in the Greek manner -- as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.'(232)

'But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar's list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.'(277)

'At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still "I don't know why he did it." It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.'(281)

'He was mourned on every continent.'(closing line)

a Touchstone Book, Edition 1993
397 pages
Book owned
Book qualifies for:100+ Reading Challenge

90. IN THE KEY of GENIUS (The Extraordinary Life of Derek Paravicini)

Adam Ockelford 2007

Derek Paravicini is an autistic musical savant with absolute 'perfect pitch' who can remember any musical piece after hearing it just once in his life. Born three months premature, one of a twin who survives but is left totally blind, they discover his musical talent after his beloved Nanny encouraged him to play an old keyboard at two years old. This work of non-fiction is narrated by the author, Derek's first piano teacher who guided him with heart-felt admiration and devotion through his first concert at nine years old, through the difficulties of adolescence, the loss of his Nanny and his current fame and successful musical career.

'Mary Ann lay absolutely still, silently praying that she had been mistaken... She sensed that the climax to a difficult six months (and a terrible week) was near. For the last seven days, doctors had battled to prevent her from going into premature labour.'(8)

'Hastily, names had been chosen that reflected something of his distinguished lineage: 'Derek' after his maternal grandfather (Derek Parker-Bowles, who had died a couple of years earlier); 'Nicolas' after his father; and 'Somerset' after a paternal grandfather, Somerset Maugham.'(11)

'That night, Nanny made another decision: since Derek couldn't see her, whenever she wasn't physically in contact with him she had better keep in touch by talking or singing... At first, of course, Derek didn't know what any of this meant, but he quickly got used to Nanny's voice-- a constant mellow stream in a complex and ever-changing auditory landscape-- and by the time he was three he could do a creditable impression of her 'warbling'.(20)

'His fascination with abstract patterns of sound, those thousands of hours spent simply listening during the first twenty months of his life, largely uncontaminated by understanding, had caused millions of special neuronal connections to form, and it was those connections that now lay behind the emergence of a precocious musicality.(34)

'Mary Ann could only smile at Nanny in disbelief. Her son truly was amazing. How could it be that this little boy, just over two years old, totally blind, virtually unable to speak and apparently able to understand very little of what was going on in the world, had taught himself to play the keyboard-- something that she couldn't even do herself?'(39)

'He began in A flat major, as Beethoven had intended, reinforcing my view that Derek must have 'perfect pitch'. This meant that whenever he heard a piece of music, the notes didn't just sound vaguely 'high' or 'low', as they do too most of us. For him, each one had its own distinct character. This gave Derek a huge advantage as he taught himself to play by ear, since he didn't have to fumble around on the keyboard, finding out what sounded right by trial and error. Before his fingers even touched the piano he already knew which notes he needed to play.'(80)

'For at the end of every session with Derek I sensed that there was still more to come-- a great deal more-- and that I hadn't as yet come near to fathoming the depths of his labyrinthine musical mind. I was continually working out how to help him realise the next level of his potential. It was rather like trying to look round the bends in a tunnel that was twisting further and further into the ground, with a light flickering somewhere at the end. Every time you thought that you'd got there, it turned out that there was another bend to negotiate. Yet on each occasion, the light that appeared to be just beyond the reach was brighter that it had been before: he was yet to show us the full brilliance of his latent musicality.(113)

'That was one of the odd things about Derek, as Nanny had observed years earlier. In order to learn a piece, he didn't physically have to practise it or even play it through. All he had to do was just listen a few times and it would be there, ready and waiting, for whatever he wanted to call it up-- sometimes years later.'(134)

'It's like the spines of a hedgehog. Imagine that each memory is a single spine. Touch its tip with precisely the right verbal label and that memory will open to you. But miss it, even by a tiny amount, and Derek won't have any idea what you're getting at. And he doesn't have the reasoning power to make an educated guess either: he doesn't do "fuzzy logic".'(221)

'There was something about Derek's playing-- an immediacy, an authority that took no prisoners-- that seemed to cut through the fault line in perception and understanding that their autism so often produced, and he was able to communicate through music with children who in almost every other situation were locked away in themselves.'(267)
_____________________________________________
Arrow edition 2008
279 pages
Book owned
_____________________________________________
I found this on You Tube, Derek at 26 years old, 4 years ago:

86. NARRATIVE of the LIFE of FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Frederick Douglass 1845

A short autobiography was originally written to chronicle the author's life as a slave in rural Baltimore in the 1800s. This book gives an intense and troubling depiction of slavery and racism at that time, and provides an intimate and moving glimpse of his heart, mind and soul as a slave: a person owned, handled, disposed of and sold like property. He discovers reading and learning as the first tool for his freedom. This literary work was instrumental in helping the earliest anti-slavery movements and should be a must-read for everyone.

'I was born in Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the largest part of the slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.'(opening lines)

'If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.'(4)

'Slaves sing most when they are unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears... The singing of a man cast away upon a desolate island might be as appropriately considered as evidence of contentment and happiness, as the singing of a slave; the songs of the one and of the other are prompted by the same emotion.'(15)

'To all these complaints, no matter how unjust, the slave must answer never a word. Colonel Lloyd could not brook any contradiction from a slave. When he spoke, a slave must stand, listen and tremble; and such was literally the case.'(19)

'Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read... and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.'(37)

'In moments of agony, I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking! It was this everlasting thinking of my condition that tormented me... The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in every thing. It was ever present to torment me with a sense of my wretched condition. I saw nothing without seeing it, I heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.'(43)

'I would pour out my soul's complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:--
"You are loosed from the moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's swift-winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in bands of iron!O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing! Alas! betwixt me and you, the turbid waters roll."'(67)

'For my part, I should prefer death to hopeless bondage.'(86)

'I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.'(98)

a Dolphin Book edition
124 pages
Book owned

Personal note: Book idea recommendation from Bibliophiliac.