lpm100's reviews
711 reviews

Book Review
Social Justice Fallacies
Thomas Sowell
5/5 stars
"Riffing on lots of older ideas." 
*******

Thelonious Monk recorded the same songs over and over again over the course of decades, and he justified it saying that "I did it so that people will hear 'em." 

And, in that sense, repetition of helpful ideas and debunking of misconceptions to the masses is a lot more helpful than the development of original ideas. (Sowell is a popularizer, and not primrily an original researcher.)

As entrenched as a lot of these misconceptions are, books like this need to be rewritten another thousand times.

Reading this book in particular reminds me of listening to a remastered cover of a favorite song. 

1. Good, but predictable; 
2. A few surprises;
3. Sharpening of other aspects in the remaster that may not have been in the original. 

Of the book:

1. Readable from beginning to end in a few hours;
2. 130 pages over five chapters;
3. 536 point citations over 130 pages. 4.12 per page (really, it's more like 1200 sources, because some of the point citations have as many as 5 sources);
4. Sowell cites himself 36 times. 

Interesting factoids: 

1. John Maynard Keynes was actually a hardcore eugenicist and was a founder of the Eugenics society at Cambridge University.

2. Even though it has gone down the memory hole, genetic determinism and Eugenics was popular with the progressive / left-wing people a century ago. (Part of the benefit of an author who sources so heavily is that the paper trail is there.)

3. "The innocent sounding word 'arrange' cannot be allowed to obscure these dangers. Interior decorators arrange. Governments compel. It is not a subtle distinction."

4. "In his book, 'The New Freedom,' Woodrow Wilson arbitrarily defined government benefits as a new form of freedom, thereby verbally finessing a side concerns about expanding powers of government being a threat to people's freedom."

5. "There are more hockey players from Sweden in the NHL than there are hockey players from California, even though the population of California is nearly four times the population of Sweden."

6. Concepts fleshed out:

a. Reciprocal inequalities 
b. Surrogate decision makers 
c. Preempting decisions 

7. White, female headed single parent families have had a poverty rate more than double the poverty rate of black married couple families in every year from 1994 to 2020.

8. "People are not hired or paid for their innate potentialities. They are hired, paid, admitted to colleges or accepted into other desired positions on the basis of their developed capabilities relevant to the particular endeavor.

9. "Madison Grant, whose book Hitler called "
'his Bible,' was likewise a staunch progressive of the early 20th century.... He was from a wealthy family in New York, and he was educated at Yale and the Columbia University Law School."

Second order thoughts: 

Sowell has written so many good things that he could reasonably expected to spend much of his career sharpening and restating things that he developed in the first half. (To continue the musical metaphor: Billy Joel has not put out a new album in 30 years, but he still can sell out Madison Square Garden by replaying and riffing on his existing repertoire.)

Even Sowell's best book, "Knowledge and Decisions" was an exposition of already existing research.

The whole book reads like a broadside, but in reality it serves better as a reference book to study other topics more deeply. 

It has elements from the following books of his that I've already read (and that he self-cites):

1. Knowledge and Decisions 
2. Discrimination and Disparities
3. Race and Culture
4. Quest for Cosmic Justice 
5. Affirmative Action....
6. Intellectuals and Society
7. Wealth, Poverty and Politics 
8. Economic Facts and Fallacies 
9. Charter Schools and Their Enemies
10. Housing Boom and Bust
11. Trickle Down Theory
12. Basic Economics
13. Race and Economics
14. Black Education, Myths and Tragedies
15. Man of Letters
16. A Personal Odyssey 
17. Inside American Education

In addition, there are books But dozens of other authors that are worth reading in their own right.

Verdict:

Recommended. Wait until it gets down to about $10.

Book Review 
Marrying Out
Keren McGinty 
2/5 stars
"Low value added" 

*******
Of the book:

-205 pages of prose (read more like 410 pages)
-4 chapters. 51.25/per
-751 point citations. 3.66/page (=Very heavily sourced)

This is the second book that I've read like this in the past couple of months. ("Like this"=a book composed of interviews.)

This book and the other one (which I will not identify) suffered from the exact same problem:  The author was so interested in expanding his/her thoughts that information acquired from the subjects' interviews was buried almost completely underneath all of the author's expatiation. 

A better way that this book *could have* been done would have been to just choose a dozen representative interviews and put them in the book "Alex Haley" style and then put the discussion and conclusions at the end of each chapter WITH A MINIMUM OF WORDS. 

As it happens, the ratio here of the author's words to the subjects of the book was probably at least 75 to 1. 

The book is also unremarkable for several other reasons:

1. Different types of white groups in the United States/North America have been marrying each other freely for many centuries. So, I'm not sure why Jewish people would actually need to be a special case. 

2. Most normal guys DO NOT want to be with a woman that reminds them of their mother. (There may be evolutionary reasons behind that; it would make sense.)

The easiest way to do this would be to just find some other ethnicity to pursue and have babies with. 

3. From the perspective of a Jewish person of either sex, think about it: 

As of today, there are

-219 million white people in the United States. 
-7.5 million Jews.
-211.5/7.5≈28:1, the ratio of Gentiles to Jews.

So, you could have 28 partners to choose from compared to only one if you decided to stay only with people of the same religion.

And that's just assuming that you stay within white people. 

Jewish men are also known to appreciate Non-white Trim, to the point where it has become a sociological cliche. (Mark Zuckerberg. Sy Kravitz, etc. Walter Yetnikoff referred to his stable of women as his "shiksa farm." Locally, I have seen Jewish men pass over white Jewish ladies to take black ones on MULTIPLE occasions.)

If you were a guy that wanted a natural blonde Nordic type (a lot of gentlemen prefer blondes, and this book ascribes that guilt to Jewish men), then you would be looking for a long time/sorting through many fewer choices just to find that one phenotype within Jewish women. 

By me: Southern European/Jewish women are the pinnacle of human evolution (think: Armenians, Italians, Romanians), but not everybody shares that opinion. (Crazy, isn't it?)

4. Jewish men have beenv eagerly injecting their DNA into non-Jewish ladies for thousands of years by now. (How else to explain people like the Lemba? How else explain the genetic divergence between Ashkenazim and Sephardim? How else to explain the genetic markers in certain Spaniophone/Chinese/Indian populations? )

There were a few interesting statistics in here, but not enough to justify the time-cost of reading the book. 

1. Most of the women eventually convert. 

2. Most of the children are raised as Jewish. 

3. A lot of times these men are lax in observance, and the Gentile wife is the one that pulls the family further toward Jewish observance.

I had wanted to read McGinty's book on intermarriage between Jewish ladies and Gentile men, but after this book I don't think I will.

If you want this information, I think there's a forward article about it and that's about all the needs to be said about that.

If you were a father who wanted to advise his sons to consider the type of Jewish women that most Jewish men overlook, You won't really get that much information from this book. 

Verdict: Not recommended. 

Book Review
People Love Dead Jews 
4/5 stars
"Tapestries of debatable and thought provoking prose" 

*******
So much to think about in this slim (and angry) volume--which actually appears to be a series of freestanding essays put together to be a book. 

(Disclosure: I'm looking at this as a person who has two identities. Black. Jewish.)

Things can be spun to be much worse than what they might actually be. 

With a nod to a Yiddish proverb ("It could always be worse"), first is that the anti-Semitism is not as bad as the author makes it: 

1. US average household income of $67,521, Haredi Jewish respondents reporting $136,000.  Modern Orthodox, $218,000. 

2. US life expectancy, 76.3 years. US Jewish life expectancy, 77-80.7 years

3. Jewish egg donors have demand FAR in excess of supply and get premium prices. (Blacks are rarely selected as egg donors.)

4. Jews have been living on North America for *centuries* without much incident. 

5. Russia: 144 million population. 132K are Jews. 48 out of the top 200 wealthiest in Russia are Jewish. (0.09%) That is a 27,272 fold overrepresentation.

******
∆∆Some of these incidents are what you would expect for a high income, high achieving ethnic group--and Jews are neither unique nor exceptional in this case. (Chinese people, for example, have had difficulty in many places they have lived, such as Indonesia and Malaysia.)

∆∆Some of these phenomenon are situational/incidental: 

1. With so much history over so much space (as in the Jewish case), then some of it will involve bad experiences with other tribes. 

Some groups of people have gone into the dustbin of history, and it is only because they don't have the ability to write things down that they have been forgotten about. (Beothuk, Aberginian, Ababco, etc.) And so in this way, at least there are Jewish people here to still bear witness to these events.

2. If you produce good people (which Jews are able to do with the greatest of ease), then you will get a lot of haters and jealous people. The Black Hebrew Israelite shooters from the Jersey City massacre are one of about 1.6 million black people that are INSANELY JEALOUS of Jewish success. 

One way to solve this problem would be to just have the accomplishments of (low-achieving / low-cognitive-ability) black people! 

Not only would you not have anybody feeling jealous of your accomplishments, but you would be pretty much ignored --save for that odd feature on the news about armed robbery / other violent crime or maybe the latest rap- country mashup.

Somehow I doubt that that is a trade-off that Dara Horn is willing to make.

3. Finance work (bankers, etc) and legal work (ACLU, etc) are fairly unpopular professions.

There are disproportionate numbers of Jews in these lines of work, and that could explain the fact that Jews are "mildly but widely disliked." (ADL report).

The author gives the case of Joseph Süss Opprenheimer, who was a "Jewish financier for Prussian royalty in the 18th century." She says that he was executed on fraudulent anti-Semitic charges, but other sources say that he made a lot of enemies as a result of his power and connections and finance. 

That's not unreasonable.

People who are Joe Everyman have the benefit of security by obscurity. 

Not so much for people like: Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, Janet Yellen, Ben Bernanke

4. Jewish author Dennis Prager wrote a book "Why The Jews?" to offer some thoughts about anti-Semitism. He observed that: "50% of radicals are Jews but not 50% of Jews are radicals."

He also had a chapter called "non-Jewish Jews" in which he admitted that a "disproportionate number" of people involved in the destruction of American civilization have been Jews.

A lot of people see/have seen Jews as a Fifth Column. (Think about somebody like George Soros and how much damage he is going to cause for years to come.)

The author quotes: (p. 196): "Another power-hungry, mischievous attorney with an ax to grind." 

5. In the case of Horn's chapter about Jews living in China: China has been an assimilation machine for thousands of years, and so the disappearance of Jews is business as usual, and not anything sinister. 

China is also a gigantic counterfeiting operation that sometimes masquerades as a nation, and so the counterfeit Jewi identity that they made is not unexpected. (Interesting factoid: at one time there were 20,000 Jews living in Harbin.)

6. A lot of this is the Inherent European / White People Weirdness: Murder people that have lived with you for a thousand years and who want to contribute and pay taxes (Germans murdering Jews in one generation) And then import a bunch of people that have have been intent on destroying you for the last 1,300 years or so (This is Germans bringing in Arabs / Syrians).

It's just a coincidence that those were the circumstances in which Jews found themselves. (It's also the same way that a lot of progressive Jews think that consistently-Israel-supporting white evangelicals are their worst enemies, but viciously antisemitic black people are their allies.)
*******
Second order thoughts:

1. (p 175) The author asks "At what point does one simply accept what is past is past?"

This is a valid question: Normative Orthodox Judaism commemorates all of the various Jewish tragedies on ONE particular day, once a year: Tisha b'av. And the purpose of this is to bring closure and get on with the festive events in this limited life we do have.

Most of the elderly Israeli interviewees here have put the past behind them.

Black people in the States have turned interpreting everything as a "legacy of slavery" into an art form--at the expense of developing strategies for the world that they actually wake up in every day.

Which of these paths makes more sense to you? 

2. Forgetting goes both ways: Satmar Hasidim have been very active trying to erase the culture of Yemeni Jews (in the United States, subject of a documentary).

Haredim have put the actual circumstances of life in the European ghetto down the memory hole in favor of a sanitized/idealized version. 

3. (p.149, 152) Author observes that the humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival can cause the rescued to resent their rescuers. (This explains the obnoxious attitude of Cubans in Miami; Ayaan Hirsi Ali has mentioned that Somali refugees in the Netherlands  complained all day about how bad the Netherlands was.) 

How much does any country ever want to get involved with refugees, given that? 

4. Author makes a reasonable case that Jewish people's names were not changed at Ellis Island. She says that the weight of evidence says that they filed in court to change their names because of anti-semitic difficulties in getting a job.

5. If you had people hate you, would you rather they hated you because they see you as a formidable opponent (anti-Semitism) or because they see you as unintelligent, inept, and pitiable? (This is 99% of anti black racism, which is worldwide and universal.)

Verdict: Well written, but very debatable. I might reread this a couple of years down the road to see what else I can get from it.

∆∆Chapter synopses: 

1. Thoughts on Anne Frank 
2. History of the Jews of Harbin, China. 
3. Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. 
4. Soviet Union executions 
5. Literary criticism / discussions. 
6. Ellis Island never happened. 
7. San Francisco synagogue shooting. 
8. Study of Varian Fry, a great rescuer of Jews. 
9. Diarna software And the mapping of lost Jewish communities of the Middle East.
10. Auschwitz museum 
11. Thoughts on the anti-semitic "Merchant of Venice" 
12. Jersey City Hebrew Israelite shooting.

Quotes:

(p. 132): "But there's something also inherently shameful in the rescuer-rescued relationship -- The humiliation of being reduced to depending on another person for survival -- and that shame expresses itself in resentment toward rescuers."

(p. 28) English titles of Chinese works: 

1. Unveiling the secrets of Jewish Success in the World Economy; 
2. What's Behind Jewish Excellence? 
3. The Financial Empire of the Rothschilds
4. Talmudic Wisdom In Conducting Business
5. Talmud: The Greatest Jewish Bible for Making Money.

(p. 221) "Instead, it's [Talmud] more like a ridiculously long social media thread, complete with pedantic back and forths, hashtagged references, non-stop links and memes, and limitless sub-threads, often with almost no discernable arc or goal. Or, to use a more timeless metaphor, it's like walking into a room full of people engaged in a heated conversation - - people who are constantly interrupting one another and shunting the conversation onto different tracks, and who don't care at all if you know what they're talking about, and who therefore never bother to explain why any of this matters." 

(p. 227) Berachot 6a:6

(p. 155) Over 50,000 Jews were murdered in the Petliura pogrom in Ukraine in 1919.

Book Review 
Myths of Migration
4/5 stars
"A thoughtful look at a charged topic." 

Of the book: 

-669 point citations
-1.8/page
-23 chapters@16 pages per

For people who don't want to read the book, I would say the 3 biggest themes are:

1. Immigration is a Rorschach blot test: whatever you project onto it is what you already believe. 

2. Public policy favors more well-off people, and immigration policy is universally the same thing from one country to the next in that regard.

3. Migration, both legal and illegal, are informed by economic calculus and incentives. A good economy will attract more immigrants and a bad economy will cool them off.

There are some good things that this book has going for it:

1. It is on the Basic Books Label. (I've read only good books from that label, with one notable exception.)

2. It is fabulously easy to read and impressively well written for someone who speaks English as a second language (and had to do all of his sourcing in a foreign language).

The essays are all free-standing and can thus be read out of order or reread later for some of the interesting things.

3. It is a very thoughtful book.

There are, however, a few other things that make me less confident in the knowledge that I gained from this book:


FIRST IS THAT the author is a sociologist, and I think an economist co-author would have been helpful for some of the discussions of the microeconomic aspects. 

-Primo: A lot of the discipline is giving intellectual scaffolding / camouflage to ideas that are essentially political in nature. (p.144: "... real causes of these problems are not immigration, but deliberately policy choices that deregulated labor markets, decreased job security, we can trade unions, eroded workers rights, depressed wages and increased income inequality.")

-Secundo:  Sociology has not moved into its maturity, it is not really that well-respected as a discipline. (Not without reason!)

SECOND IS THAT the author is carrying around a lot of White Guilt. He seems to use it to make a lot of false symmetries, which makes this whole book somewhat suspect: 

1. Equate the European colonization of The New World as equivalent to gate crashers from Central and South America into the United States. (Or at least to not treat the European colonization as motivated by economic incentives.)

The first was people who came and found no republic set up and they built one. The second are people that are entering an existing republic and undoing the existing structure. 

2. He (myth 4) seems to assume that just because something has been true in the past then it will be true in the future. So, White Christian Germans were thought to be unassimilable about a century ago, and it turned out to not be true. Therefore, medievally-oriented Muslim Arabs will take the same direction as Germans did and just be a piece of cake to assimilate.

Unlikely. (Lindy's law: something is likely to happen as long is it already has been happening; The Arabs are likely to stay mentally in the 7th century as long as they have already been there.)

3. (p.203) The ONLY reason that some immigrants are arrested is because police seek them out and prosecutors prosecute them at a higher rate than they do non-whites. (It's like Haitians in Miami / other similar examples don't even exist for this author.)

4. He seems to find a way to talk away a lot of things--especially things that might be important to people who have to actually live with immigrants. (p.230: "The Latino workers... wouldn't speak English... There were also annoyances such as the driving habits of the Mexican workers, who often didn't have licenses and frequently ignored traffic rules. The immigrant workers would parked cars in front yards and leave garbage cans and trash strewn on the lawns destroying the grass.... They came from places in the Mexican countryside where a perfectly kept lawn was not a thing.")

THIRD IS THAT Some of his observations are just technically untrue / on-the-facts wrong. 

1. (p.137). Multiplier effect. Author talks is if this is something that is undisputed, but it's just...... not. There are disagreements about both the magnitude and direction of said multiplier.

2.(Myth 9, p. 154): "The root cause of the growing lack of affordable housing across the West is not immigration, but a sharp decline in the stock of social and rent protected housing units because of changes in housing policies." 

Just....NO. (" Social housing" is his word for housing projects/section 8.) Housing projects have been such a bad idea in The States that local governments have had to stop funding them or actively tear them down. (You would not expect something good to happen when people occupy houses that they will never own and for the upkeep of which they are not responsible. And if you know that, you know that it is a bottomless pit for government revenue.) 

They are serious reservoirs of crime that create extremely expensive policing costs and fodder for the criminal justice system. (If Latisha has 6 sons by 7 different men and none of them are present in the children's lives, then jail is a very likely outcome for several. Incarceration is not cheap.)

In case we forgot, he comes back to rent controlled housing again in Myth 11

3. (Myth 12) Author says that immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born people, but does he only mean violent crime? And does it have to be illegal for it to be bad? And can it be that overall is the same, but some are disproportionately criminal in specific sectors? 

For example: we have medical fraud cases around here in the Southeast Michigan newspapers on a weekly basis, and almost 100% of them are Arab. (Michigan is 1.555% Arab.) 

4. Author seems to assume that gaps in income between different ethnic groups are *always and everywhere* because of discrimination. (Myth 10) But then, in the very next chapter he is producing the concept of "downward mobility" (=more contact of immigrant groups with lower class natives and assimilation thereto) to explain immigrant criminality. 

Sloppy reasoning, and you can't have it both ways.

5. Reality does not exist for this guy. If two groups have a difference in performance in general, then it just MUST be because of racism and no other reason. If you have some people decide that other people are not a good fit for them socially (blacks are the least selected group for interracial marriage) or in business contexts (It is not common for black people to be hired in Middle Eastern or Asian businesses where they can be in a position to touch cash), then it cannot be that they excluding parties have learned from their prior experiences. It MUST be racism.

6. (p.178). "Fundamental pillars of American society have remained unaltered, including... the dominance of English." (Has this guy ever tried speaking English in Miami? Or Texas?)

7. (p.281). Author derived public opinion on immigration from surveys--which are notoriously unreliable.
*******
Second order thoughts:

1. I do wonder what this means for black people. The author mentions (p. 40) that the cut off of Asian immigration was what prompted the Great Migration of blacks from the south. So, if there were no other source of labor available, then employers would use blacks. But.... If there is a lot of South American labor available, might the process reverse and employers would choose them in favor of blacks? (I deliver to factories here in Southeast Michigan, and there are quite a few where there are ZERO black people employed; most of our skilled trades unions are also very nearly 100% white in these parts.)

2. The author keeps repeating over and over again that such-and-such is such a "small amount"  or "a low percentage." That's not really the greatest argument, because only 5% of immigration to the US is Muslim, but they are 90% of our terror attacks/foiled terror attacks.

He also has said in several places that this-or-that is only some "small percent of the GDP." So if something is 2.3% of the GDP, it's actually 10% of the entire budget. (US government budget is 23% of GDP.)

Migrants are "only"  3% of the world population. 3% of 8.1 billion is 243 million people.

3. At the very end of the book he says that he is not in the business of making policy recommendations, but I do wonder: is there any way that immigration can be properly regulated? Has anybody figured out how to do this? 

4. When there are conflicts between two groups of people, they have to have started somewhere. The conflict between Hakka (Chinese for "guest people") and Punti people went on for about 1,000 years *only after the Hakka moved there*, and they are still referred to as "guest people"  1,000 years later.

Could South American immigration tip the United States into a language conflict? It will have to start somewhere. 
********

Neat factoids:

1. Haratins are blacks in Mauritania, where slavery was just abolished in 1981.

2. Segregation index means zero when completely integrated and 100 when totally segregated. Black segregation is currently 60, Asian is 39 and Latino is 51. (Above 60 is considered high.)

3. Immigration is typically done by people that can afford it, which explains why it is the wealthier people in middle income countries and not the lowest income people in low income countries.

4. Immigration increases higher incomes more than it increases lower incomes. Wealthy people take far more of the benefit of immigrants far more often than working squares.

5. Immigrants will not be enough to refresh aging populations, first because the numbers of people needed are just not feasible. (Keeping the demographic support ratio would require $593 million immigrants from 1995 to 2050. That would be 10.8 million people per year, over 10 times the actual immigration. Japan would require 553 million people over the same period.) And second because immigrant fertility levels declined two / below native levels just within one generation.

6. "Discursive gap." Politicians talk a tough game but prosecutions are less than 25 per year (This is out of a total of 11 million employers). Jail time happens for less than five people per year and finds range from $583 to $4,667 per violation. One person out of every 14,000 illegal immigrants was arrested at a work site during even the Trump crackdown (p.258).

7. Left and right wing immigration parties are divided within themselves: left wing parties favor labor unions (who are hostile to immigration), but consider freedom of movement a human right; right wing parties favor business lobbies (who want cheap labor), But consider law and order and enforcement of borders their ideological selling point. Resulting policies are correspondingly incoherent.

8. (p.307). The amount spent on border enforcement is 24% higher than the combined costs of the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Marshals, and Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. 

9. The author breaks the imaginary link between climate change and immigration, and it's not going to make him any friends.

10. Sex work is nothing like in the movie "Taken." A lot of women come to do one job and find out that they can make better money per hour as sex workers, and they do it quite voluntarily.

VERDICT: Guarded recommendation. Second hand purchase only. 

Vocabulary: 

Haratins (Black people in Mauritania)

land subsidence

polder

Quotes: 

"War made the state and the state made war." (Charles Tilly)

"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary worker."

Book Review
A Piece of Cake
1/5 stars
"Too many improbable events all at once. A waste of $6.59 and 3 hours of reading time." 
*******

At first I had thought that "If this really happened in quite the way that she said it did, she might be hamming it up a bit " 

By the 9th chapter, that had changed to "This is totally implausible."

By page 126, I knew I had been duped.

Let me just put out there how many books I've read like this that were not believable/ of questionable accuracy:

1. Thoughts From a Unicorn (Shais Rishon)
2. Mountain Family (Tzeril Rus Berger)
3. A Long Way Gone (Ishmael Beah)
4. Manchild in the Promised Land (Claude Brown)

There's also a whole genre of literature that is written about hoaxes. 

1. Anthony Godby Johnson hoax (book: "A Rock and A Hard Place")
2. Kaycee Nicole hoax (a blog)
3. Kodee Kennings hoax (newspaper articles, etc)


It would actually have been better if these events had never happened; I get so sick of stories about semi-literate, uneducated, criminal black people that can't speak English and can't conceive of doing anything other than doping / drinking and flash mobs (which were happening even in the 1970s, if you believe this book).

Just.....some of the unlikely things that happened here: 

1. The abusive foster mother seems like some of her behaviors were lifted right out of Joan Crawford's biography written by her stepdaughter (serving half cooked chicken, etc.)

2. Everything seems to happen within 30 seconds of the author's changing situations/making a decision. She walked right out of a house, and within less than 10 minutes runs into a prostitute and 10 minutes after that is turning tricks (as an 11-year-old). 

3. It never takes more than 5 minutes for her to convince somebody to buy liquor for a 12-year-old. 

4. She was interested in weed and alcohol 3 minutes after she took her first hit. And within 15 pages is a pot-smoking Mad Dog-swilling hardcore hooker. 

5. After 3 days sleeping in a park waiting for Western Union (strange, because this was 40 years after Western Union had developed the technology to send money instantly)

Again, at 12.

6. She is shuttled to her second foster home within 61 pages, and it is even bigger than the last place she left from. And the foster mother was also bad, and there was more sexual abuse. (What is the probability that this girl would have that many living relatives alive and yet get sent away from them and shunted directly into a foster home?)

7. It seems like she is "jumped in" to the gang after about a week. I've watched documentaries, and they consistently say that these gang members want to watch you for a little while before they think about accepting a recruit.

8. p.126 is the point at which I had to put the book down. Cupcake says that "there's a line in the book that said 'the color purple just wanted to be loved like everything else.'"

CONTINUITY ERROR: "The Color Purple" was written in 1982. She would have been 17 years old at that time. 

But, she claims to have been reading "The Color Purple" at 15--which would have been in 1980-- 2 years before the book was actually written.
*******
There is the over-the-top use of Negro Dialect in her prose, and that is actually a problem:

1. I've seen her in interviews, and she speaks normal English. 

2. Also, even black people who speak in... "that way" don't write in "that way."  (All the books that I have read and I can only remember EXACTLY ONE That was written completely in Negro Dialect: "The Goophered Grapevine," by Charles Chestnutt.)

3. The changing between these forms of English is effortless and everybody seems to know when/how to do it. (All of my relatives know when to do it. If somebody is speaking publicly at a funeral or a family reunion, then it's done all in normal English.)

4. Claude Brown had the same type of speech in his book ("He was getting mannish in the closet with a high yaller girl,") and I don't think I've ever heard anybody talk that way except maybe Halle Berry when she tried to play a tragic mulatto slave character. (It should tell you something that her acting is so bad that she won the razzie award.)

Verdict: Not recommended. I spend $6.59 and probably about 3 hours worth of reading time, and I can't get it back.

Book Review 
Troubled
Rob Henderson 
5/5 stars
"Introduction to the concept of 'luxury beliefs'; for me, but not for thee." 
******
This *would be* one bildungsroman among countless others, but for the fact that Henderson brings us a powerful exposition of the concept of "luxury beliefs." 

It would not be enough for him to have merely done this in a blog post, but he had to give us an entire narrative arc that took us with him on the journey before he developed this idea. 

Luxury beliefs are: ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. 

For example: 

1. Monogamy is outdated. 
2. Drug experimentation 
3. Abolishing the police

A lot of hypocrisy and double standards here: 

1. Steve Jobs prohibited his children from using iPads; 

2. Chip and Joanna Gaines have some home improvement television show but don't allow their own kids to watch television and don't own one themselves.

Etc....

This author writes in a very straightforward, matter-of-fact, even-handed way; It probably took a lot of restraint to do that about the ridiculousness beyond words of the situation. (He puts me in mind of JD Vance, except that his was about West Coast instead of Appalachian White Trash.)

And there are a couple of other streams in his book:

1. Stability is important for raising children. 

2. The military can be a good thing because it provides that stability in formative years. 

3. People often virtue signal on behalf of people they don't even know.

4. Elites in a society are often completely out of touch with people that they claim to speak for (And this could have been a book in its own right, because I can think of examples from thousands of years ago of the identical phenomenon.)

5. Adopted children also have a lot of problems because their parents had a lot of problems. ("16% of serial killers in the United States are adoptees, which is a higher percentage than the 2–3% of the general population who are adopted." David Berkowitz (a.k.a. Son of Sam), Ted Bundy, Aileen Wuornos, Joel Rifkin, the Boston Strangler, Jeremy Strohmeyer were all adopted.)

The fact that this was his writing about his own difficult upbringing was important, because it seems like people that are self-actualization chips for Virtue Signaling Fabulous White People almost never get a chance to tell their own story. (Ibram Kendi went to an all-white school-- and it seems THAT'S where he figured out that he had to speak on behalf of black people.)

In a way, this reminds me of the rule that drug dealers have of never using their own product. It's just that here, you have Virtue Signaling Fabulous White People selling ideas that they don't actually believe.

Verdict: Recommended.

Sample quotes: 

"I did want a father figure. I just preferred to choose for myself who it would be. I'd constructed makeshift role models from fragments of pop culture and television and books. These distant idols were reliable - - there was no risk of them disappearing from my life."

"This was the first time that I had learned that the word 'work' has different meanings depending on one's perspective."

"When educated Americans discuss what's best for kids, we tend to talk about education as the be-all and end-all, when it should be seen more as the fortunate benefit of a warm and loving upbringing." 

".... when a young male has been overlooked by his parents, he will 'gravitate to the ubiquitous male peer militaristic world. He will then join this world as a child soldier, a gang member, mercenary, member of a militia, or, if he is lucky, a well-resourced military unit. '" (Joyce Benenson)

"Contrary to my belief, I learned that the military is not just a destination for poor or working-class kids who drew him because their options are limited."

"The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of feeding needs." (Durkheim)

"The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master's ability to pay."

"When someone uses the phrase 'cultural appropriation,' what they are really saying is 'I was educated at a top college.'"

"The poor reap what the luxury belief class sows."

"The general opinion at these schools is that the First [amendment] needs a major overhaul and the Second [amendment] should be completely dismantled. Seems like we basically got duped into believing we are upholding American values while the future ruling class are figuring out out ways to undermine them. "

"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” (Charles Baudelaire)

"In the same way you don't notice how entrenched you are in your specific culture or nationality until you travel to another country, you also don't notice your social class until you enter another one." 

"Frankly, I found that college extends adolescence to a laughably old age."

"Restricting some freedom is essential for children to grow up, or, in the case of my enlistment, recover from the process of growing up."

"We now live in a culture where affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviors, decisions, and attitudes of marginalized and deprived kids that they would never accept for themselves or their own children. And they claim to do it in the name of compassion."

"I watched students claim that investment banks were emblematic of capitalist oppression, and then discovered that they had attended recruitment sessions for Goldman Sachs."

"Being in a bad environment doesn't eliminate all the good parts of you and being in a good environment doesn't eliminate all the bad parts of you."

Book review
Bad Therapy
5+/5 stars
"Iatrogenic mental health treatment is the risk; Lose the smartphones, social media and helicopterish tendencies." 
*******

Of the book: 

-389 sources; 32/chapter
-1.6/page (=well sourced)
-251 pages of prose/12 chapters=20/per
-4-5 hours of reading time

*******
This is a GREAT book for parents:

FIRST: it has a lot of information all in one place that a lot of parents should know. (A lot of these ideas are in the ether, but parents can't find a good discussion of them all in one place / can't quite put their finger on what is wrong in many aspects of children's mental health.) 

What are "these ideas"? 

1. The reinterpretation of every single minor stressor in a child's life as something that needs therapy. 

2. Say's Law (i.e.--supply generates its own demand), as applied to the mental health industry. 

3. Things that have been discussed very intelligently by a number of authors: 

a  Jonathan Haidt demonstrates that as conditions get easier in developing countries, what is defined as a "stressor"  keeps getting defined down.

Before: people survived combat in World War II and most went back to living normal lives. 

Nowadays: people need years of therapy if someone merely makes a mean face at them. 

b. Authors such as Lenore Skenazy have talked about the damage from helicopter parenting.

c. Eric Hoffer quote: "What the intellectual craves in his innermost being is to turn the whole globe into a classroom and the world’s population into a class of docile pupils hanging onto the words of the chosen teacher." AND "A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is a threat to the worker’s sense of worth."

d. There are even resonances to the fine work of Lenore Skenazy: "Helicopter parents create idiot children." 

SECOND: It brings across the point *loud and clear* that once you start down the road of trying to medicalize every minor problem of a child...... that way, madness lies.

If you have a child that you think needs to be medicated, you must be EXTREMELY JUDICIOUS in taking that direction.

*******
What are other takeaway messages?

1. Therapy is to solve some "problematic"  mental state can actually be iatrogenic . Trying to remedy a mental state may end up inducing that mental state. 

2. Once you start down the path of Therapy for unnecessary reasons, it's very hard to get out of that state. 

3. Just because any conceivable thing *could* be medicalized does not mean that it *should* be. 

4. Excessive rumination will cause people to put themselves into a certain mental state that they might have otherwise been able to shake off. 

5. Basic microeconomic concepts can explain a lot of this: 

a. A therapist has an incentive for therapy to be open-ended, because that means that she has a job indefinitely.

b. She is going to choose patients that have smaller problems and stretch out the sessions (chiropractors have been doing this for over a century), because they're easier to treat than people that are really ill / frankly psychotic. And they're likely to have better insurance that will pay better reimbursement rates.

*******
Spillover thoughts: 

1. Once you realize that these problems are such as they are, your best bet is to send your kids to some type of parochial school. (Jewish is my preference, but Catholic or Muslim would work just fine.)

2. People have survived for several hundred thousand years without smartphones, so there's no reason that kids cannot make it without them just a little bit longer. 

3. The author is very opposed to any type of medication, but in moderate doses it can be very helpful--And I speak as a very experienced parent of hyperactive children. (Drugs such as Ritalin have a half-life of 2.5 hours.)

Ten steps to bad/useless / overwrought therapy: 

1. Teach kids to pay close attention to their feelings; 
2. Induce rumination; 
3. Make "happiness" a goal but reward emotional suffering;
4. Affirm and accommodate kids worries; 
5. Monitor, monitor, monitor;
6. Dispense diagnoses liberally; 
7. Drug 'em;
8. Encourage kids to share their "trauma";
9. Encourage young adults to break contact with "toxic" family;
10. Create treatment dependency

Verdict: Recommended. 

Vocabulary: 

state orientation
action orientation
iatrogenic 

Quotes:

(p.61): "If your career isn't going well, if you're having trouble in relationships, if you're dissatisfied with your life, commence the hunt for hidden childhood traumas."

(p.80): " For more than a decade, they have been quietly increasing and expanding their interventions, transforming every school into an outpatient mental health clinic, staffed largely by those with no real training in mental health."

(p.128): "Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page. You can go in there and change it - - but so can other people."

(p.215): "... Poet Robert Hayden felt his father's devotion not through any declaration, which his father may never have made, but paid out in steady acts of sacrifice [=working a second job on freezing cold Sundays]."

(p.216): "WhatsApp has become a nightmarish blizzard of parental anxiety." 

(p. 225): "Sometimes the Israeli Defense Forces will provide young recruits or mistaken address to test the Young person's ability to handle adversity. The army - - and Israeli society more generally - - believes it has a responsibility to force young people to handle the unexpected. They consider this essential preparation for a life full of unpleasant surprises."

Book Review:"When We Cease To Understand The World" 
3/5 stars
" Fictional interpolations into scientific biographies is gimmicky and not really all that helpful."
********
The first thought is that being on the New York Times Best Books list is not really a guarantee of being all that great. (Slightly better than Oprah's book club, which is a nearly 100% predictor of being trash.)

There is a verse in Tanach (Shemot, 33:20 "But you cannot see My face, for a human being may not see Me and live.”)
that reminds me of certain of these events:

A scientist losing his mind in behind the discovery of some brilliant series of inventions happened so much that it borders on sociological cliché at this point. 

(Gödel starved himself to death. Grigori Perelman turns down $1 million in Nobel prize money and another $15,000 in fields prize money because he refused to accept the prize. He lives in the basement with his mother playing ping pong all day.)

I really do wonder why are these secrets only open to people that are frankly crazy? And do they become crazy after they figure these things out, as it seems from this book? 

Or was this Discovery process and impelling factor only in pushing them over the edge? (p.74: "After spending so long gazing down at the foundations of mathematics, his mind had stumbled into the abyss.")

Here we add:

1. Grothendieck made his discoveries and then spent several decades in a peripatic state of existence, cut off from his family members. 

2. Shinichi Mochizuki. Takes all the trouble to write proofs and then won't present or defend them or answer any questions about them. 

Another cliché: Jewish scientists at the top of their game. Albert Einstein. Fritz Haber. Karl Schwarzchild. John von Neumann. (It is interesting to speculate about the linkage between Ashkenazi Jewish hyperintelligence, madness and natural selection.)

Yet another cliché: Sexually freaky scientists (We already knew about Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger and Richard Feynman.) 

To this, we add a rather unflattering portrayal of Irwin Schrodinger, as well as the, um, sexually expansive Grothendieck.
******
Topics covered: 

1. Zyklon A 
2. Prussian blue 
3. Haber process for nitrogen fixing 
4. Prussic Acid
5. Schrödinger equation 
6. deBroglie wave particle duality 
7. Heisenberg uncertainty 
8. Singularities 

(Basically, nothing that you would not know if you took a couple of semesters of undergraduate physics or even read a book or two about popular physics.) 

Honorable mentions (but not covered):

1. René Thom: Catastrophe theory 
2. Weil conjectures 
3. Mochizuki-Grothendieck conjectures 
*******

Verdict: 

This book is not worth a second read, because it's probably not worth a first read.
 
And that's for several reasons: 

1. It gets really aggravating trying to separate out what really happened from the author's fictional interpolations. And you actually have to do research to find out if some of these things are true. (At least he is honest that the amount of fiction increases as the book goes on.)

Did deBroglie really build a replica of Notre Dame out of human feces? (p.114) I did not find any evidence that he did. 

Was Schrodinger really lovesick over a 16-year-old that was at the brink of death and spent her entire life in a tuberculosis sanatorium? 

2. No index, no photos. 

3. There are other books that cover these topics better without all of the mystical realism / fictional spinach.. I would recommend "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat." 

4. Magical realism is emphatically not my thing.

*******
There are several good quotes, But it's not really worth fishing through this whole book just to find them: 

(p.75): "The atoms that tore Hiroshima and Nagasaki apart were split not by the greasy fingers of a general, but by a group of physicist armed with a fistful of equations." 

(p.97): "The physicist - - like the poet-- should not describe the facts of the world, but rather generate metaphors and mental connections.

(p.109): "The father of relativity was a great master of visualization: all of his ideas about space and time had been born of his capacity to imagine himself in the most extreme physical circumstances. For this reason, he was unwilling to accept the restrictions demanded by Heisenberg, who seemed to have gouged out both of his eyes in order to see further." 

(p.187): ".... The sudden realization that it was mathematics which was changing our world to the point where, in a couple of decades at most, we simply would not be able to grasp what being human really meant.... We use it [quantum mechanics], it works as if by some strange miracle, and yet there is not a human soul, alive or dead, who actually gets it."

Chesapeake 
James Michener
5/5 stars
"The weight of 4 centuries of history, hidden in plain sight" 
******
It's really easy to forget what a large place the United States is, and what a protracted process the settlement and building of a nation was. 

Easily enough to fill several very large books about it. (This is the 4th James Michener book that I have read about said topic--the other three being "Alaska,"/ "Centennial,"/ "Hawaii.". And the book "Texas" is still sitting on the shelf.)

It has been said that Michener had an army of researchers working for him, and that does make sense because it's hard to imagine that somebody could write books with this much local color and detail working under his own steam. 

Even though this book did encompass the period of all of the major events on what became the United States, Michener seems to deliberately sidestep certain things. 

The assassination of MLK and the ensuing riots are given short shrift. (I think the book skips over 1967 to 1976). Ditto for the Civil War.

I have tried to pick 25 points that were the most interesting from the book. 1 point every 34.6 pages.
*******
Acquired information: 

1. The United States is something that grew organically and the formation of a government was secondary to bunch of people living and trading in a matter of fact way. 

a. Nobody these days thinks about moving from one state to another as defecting, but in those days.... people could talk about blaming everything on those "damned Virginians," etc.

b. There were several generations before there was a single road, let alone a currency.(All was done by barter).

It's also amazing how much people can accomplish by the simple task of self-organization and without the government putting their grubby mits into it the mix.

2. It's amazing how theocratic the character of the country was--these guys had nothing on the Taliban. 

Can you imagine somebody being sentenced to be whipped or hung because of being a Quaker? Can you imagine somebody setting up a proprietorship (which was later to become a state) as a way to create a refuge for Catholics? The ducking stool? 


3. 

a. The religious movements of one age are the literary entertainment of the next. (Quakers were a Big Thing once upon a time, but who has even met one in modern times?) 

b. It also seems to be a small matter to find a bunch of idiots who are willing to throw their lives away for any reason. (Again, as in the case of these quakers- who didn't even survive as a religious movement, for that matter).

c. A lot of dimwits will appropriate things from a mythical time period that they don't really even understand. (thee/ thy/ thou/ thine are all specific cases / have correct uses. And the "spiritual leader"  of the church spoke Aramaic, not Old english. But don't tell that to the Quakers! The bumpkinish, simple, mildly aggravating Quakers.)

4. The Indians, even though they had a rough go of things, were not all helpless victims. Some of them were peaceful and passive, and some were a lot more warlike. Settlers could not sort out the difference, so they just killed them all.

It's also amazing that they were on the North American continent for thousands of years and they never thought to invent a sail. 

5. White trash and baby daddies have been with us for a very long time. (The Turlocks!)

6. Pirates make for a lot of film fighter, but they were (and are) emphatically not good things/people.

7. Slavery in Haiti was much worse than it was in the States. The average slave there only lived for one year.

8. (p.496): "Black leaders sold their followers for baubles; Arabs chanting the Quran organized the marches; Christians intent on saving souls managed the barracoons; renegade captains transported the slaves in proscribe ships; and in Cuba pariah dealers risk buying them on the chance that they could be smuggled into the southern states, where importation of New slaves was forbidden." (No wonder Arabs just like black people so much; their contact with them was mostly as slaves. A comment slur that they have for black people is "slave.")

9. The mortality rates for blacks  brought into slavery were brutal (27 prime age blacks and 119 infants and children started a 60 day march to the shipping port; 25 prime age survived and 41 infants and children. On the ship, 431 out of 517 survived)

10. Even Jesuit priests were involved in the slave trade.

11. The conditions for slavery were hugely variable both within and between countries. For example: (p.518) "Portuguese men found their wives in the slave population, and a curious, strong and viable society developed. Slaves were slaves and were treated as such until they produced beautiful daughters; then suddenly they became the parents of the bride. At 14 the master's son was giving his own slave, the prettiest black woman of 18 on the plantation, and it became her pleasurable task to introduce the lad into an essential meaning of slavery."

12. The Black American English is actually a mix of words from field hand English and gentleman's English (and I'm impressed that Michener even noticed something like this), and he gives a mechanism by which it could have happened (p.585): field hands marrying house slaves.

13. If you have forgotten since high school (if you ever knew): the economic setup of the northern cities versus the South was completely different, and that alone is enough to explain the civil war. Slavery was an impelling factor, but not the major / sole factor.

14. Antebellum Southern society in this book was composed of: planter class (that owned a lot of slaves), the large middle (a few of which owned only one or two), and white trash swamp dwellers (who owned none, but participated in slave tracking and generally hated blacks). The Great Potato Famine made an infusion of Irish. 

(p.603): "These were the poor white trash. There were 41 Turlock scattered about Patamoke and no one could unscramble the relationships that existed among them." 

15. (p.697, 688, 693) Even as late as the 20th century, there was no clear concept of interstate trade. ("... He would telegraph the governor of maryland, requesting armed Force to repulse The Virginian invaders.") people from different states are actually battling and killing each other for dredging rights.

16. (p.646) The moulting of a crab takes about 3 hours and 20 minutes; regrowing of his shell takes another 5 hours from start to finish.

17. (p.678) People have been noticing that black people can't swim for a very long time. At least a century ago.

18. Jews were not allowed to leave Germany in the events leading up to the second world war unless they paid ransom money - - which the Germans defined as "educational reimbursement." 

19. Quakers were instrumental in raising $1 million to purchase the freedom of 40,000 Jews (p.721), but only 25,000 were saved because they could not find a country to accept the other 15,000.

20. When people talk about white trash inbreeding, it may not be just a joke. (p.693: "Turlock girls had a habit of running off with Turlock men."; p.729: "For one thing, he had married his full cousin... Fatal inbreeding head encouraged family weaknesses to multiply")

21. Marshes are filled with rubbish so as to reclaim the land. Things are built atop the rubbish. (p.780)

22. Michener has really done his homework. He picks up on the conflict between gradualist practical black men who believed in trades and saw a future in the south (such as Booker T. Washington) and more academic/radical types they wanted to go out and protest their way the economic prosperity (p.789) and solve the "equality of public accommodation" problem. He also clues into the high rate of fatherless homes. 

23. The community activist is at least half a century old. (p.791: "His two years of wandering had not improved his chances for employment, for he had mastered no trade nor improved his education in any specific field.... He had returned home prepared for only one job: to agitate the minds of Black's younger than he and to direct them in the analysis of their community.")

24. Negro Logic (p.793): Let's burn down everything we own (and don't have the wherewithal to rebuild), and then wonder why there are no customers to provide us jobs!

25. An entire island can disappear with a storm. And the events of this book happened over an area about 144 mi². About the size of Detroit.
*******
Quotes:

(p.329): "Society must be a compromise between new, untested men, who want to destroy old patterns and old, tried men, who tend to cling too long to the patterns we're trying to protect." 

(p.460): "Geese is just like men. When their minds get fixed on ass, caution goes out the window, and come next week we're going to knock down enough careless geese to feed us through July."

(p.519): "... most Nations have at one time or other both practiced and condoned slavery."

(p.769): "The quality of any human life is determined by the differential experiences which impinge upon it."

(p.826): ".... that is the risk and reward which comes from sending generations of intelligent young men to do it in alien lands: when they return they see their homeland clearly. "

(p.844): "Man's got only three obligations, really. Feed his fambly. Train his dog. Take care of his gun. You do them jobs properly, you ain't got no worries about such things as mortgages and cancer in the tax collector. You take care of the gun, God takes care of the mortgage."

Verdict: Recommended. 

Vocabulary
*******

gibbets
cutpurse
clement
appurtenances 
shallop
cupidity
scrimshaw
penurious
ketch
toothsome
palatinate 
roanoke (small "r")
werowance (by p.184. an Indian chief of Virginia or Maryland.)
*
adze
sawyer
trunnel
keelson
scantlings
jib boom 
scarph
blowsy
shrive
summum bonum
pinnace
snow (a type of ship)
unprepossessing
inglenook
ducking stool
sacque
bombazine
dimity 
excrescence
spar
luff
wallow
belaying pin
teredos
fearnought
frieze
Osnaburg 
*
burnt hartshorn (p.312)
advowson
stock (article of clothing, early form of tie)
canaille
hogshead (cask, 63 gallons)
ordnance (≠ordinance) 
tussock
doughty
widow's walk
chatelaine
livery
gimbaled
ecru
reach-and-beat
Fugitive Slave Act (1850)
peroration
malamute
factotum
Majordomo
eplithalamium
skipjack
aprowl
shanghaied 
estuary
aprowl
isohaline
spat  (a young bivalve (such as an oyster))
sook (female crab) 
cloaca (archaic word for "sewer")
drayman (p.692)
*
loblolly 
torpid
waterman/watermen≠pirate, sailor
beat a tattoo
mastoiditis 
harrows
repple depple
prosaic
palisade 
nutria
subvention
contumely
rapscallion 
davit/davit system
halyard
dacron
Avernus
Dutch door 
klaxon greeting (=blowing your horn)

Book Review
Destined To Witness
Hans Massaquoi
"A Marvel of Memory From A Resourceful Author." 
*******
QUOTE: "Autobiography, if there really is such a thing, is like asking a rabbit to tell us what he looks like hopping through the grasses of the field. How would he know? If we want to hear about the field on the other hand, no one is in a better circumstance to tell us-so long as we keep in mind that we are missing all those things the rabbit was in no position to observe." 

WOW! Does this guy have a story!

A book like this could probably only be written one time. (After all, how many half black people survived Nazi Germany? And then how many of those really were the descendant of an African prince? ) even if a reader can't remember all of the details of the narrative arc, if he could just remember 1/5 of them, he would have learned something fascinating.

The end of WWII comes exactly on page 250 (out of a book that is 440 pages long). 

The second part was his life in Liberia, up to page 411. 

And in the United States was the last 30 pages--including his time in the military while it was segregated.

WWII was the hard part, but afterwards the Allied occupation was much harder. (Hunger is no joke, and no words can describe it; almost none of us have seen firsthand a case of hunger edema. But this author did, because it happened to him. p.268)

The book is written as a series of sequential (but unnumbered) vignettes, mostly around characters and events.

But even after that, his life experience in Liberia alone would have made the book worth reading. 

And from there, he ended up in the US army in the airborne training division.

The author is:

1. Very German in his outlook (folksy, pithy and non pretentious);

2. Intelligent, and adaptable. (He sired two sons, one doctor and one lawyer. He also got to play boxer, welder/mechanic, clarinet/saxophone player.)
*******
Spillover thoughts: 

1. The German government of that time has been linked with so many bad things, that it has become a caricature. But, quiet as it is kept, there were people who lived there everyday and did not buy into the propaganda and saw at least one black person just as their neighbor. 

2. The author attributes his survival to security by obscurity (there were extremely few blacks at that time) and also the fact that Hitler's number one priority was to exterminate Jews- after which black people might have been next if he had succeeded. (There were the sterilizations that Rhineland--and that amount to something like 800 people. Also, there was lots of very cruel vivisection in Germany's African territories.)

The events of the Holocaust also take a very minor role in all of this--and I have heard some people argue that ordinary Germans didn't really know what was going on, and still others argue that they knew exactly what was going on.

This book seems to be emphatically in the camp of the former. 

3. It also appears that the Nazi movement was something that appealed to a fairly small minority of German people. (This is not hard to believe; the Transgender Hysteria that the Western world is being dragged through en masse is actually the handiwork of a very small number of people.)
 
(p.251): "I was totally unprepared for the way my countryman actually reacted to the announcement. When the news flashed repeatedly over the radio, it was met with neither jubilation nor sorrow, just monumental, yawning indifference.'

4. A lot of movies have been made about black people living in uncomfortable circumstances (in the United States), but I think they have been over dramatized.  What you reading this book is: a black guy living in a town somewhere, and in a slightly uncomfortable modus vivendi in a matter of fact way.

Some people disliked black people, and he knew to stay away from those. And to seek out people that did not have problems with him.

5. Liberia has to be a fascinating place. Americo-Liberians. With English names (Jason the house boy/ William Tubman the President/ Supreme Court Justice Eugene Shannon) and a capital city Monrovia, named after James Monroe. 

And varying degrees of social inter-mixture with the local Africans.

6. Good genes seem to rise to the top no matter what. This author found some measure of success and everything he did, and he survived in a lot of very bad circumstances.

Verdict: Emphatically recommended.
*******
Quotes 

(p.350): "How can I live in a country that doesn't have any women I like?" (Author went to his father's home country of Liberia, where all the women are black. Yuck.) 

(p.324): "... They jived to what the Nazis had always derided as 'Negermusik.' I was sure that if the Führer hadn't blown out his brains, the mere sight of his cherished Deutsche Madchen with the 'ape-like creatures' would have killed him."

(p.316): " .. could make the difference between cordial acceptance as a brother and cold rejection as an unwelcome stranger. It had me taking long to find out that most black Americans considered Africans and Africa backward and thus a personal embarrassment."

(p.315): "I would decision to avoid American ships for a while with academic, since there was not a single one in Port."

(p.357): "Diehard followers of Hitler didn't believe in an Allied victory until Allied troops actually marched through Germany's streets.. while Germans opposed to Hitler predicted a German defeat from the very outset of the war."

(p.382): "We simply don't have the resources in Liberia to incarcerate thousands of law breakers for any length of time. The best way to deal with most of the criminal elements on this plantation is to give them a good whipping that, hopefully, they won't forget very soon."

(p.399): "My grandmother confided to me that my grandfather... was an intolerable ladies man.... She said that the more than 20 children momolu admitted having fathered in and out of wedlock were only the tip of the iceberg."

(p.403): "She gave Felix a long lecture on how Arab Muslims led raiding parties throughout Africa and either captured or bought from greedy African Chiefs large numbers of slaves, whom they then sold to eager European and American slave traders."

(p.405): "Morris was familiar with President Tubman's permissive policy on graft, which expected government employees to steal a little as long as they remembered to reach into the government to tell no further than their elbows instead of all the way to their armpits."

Vocab/concepts:

Rhineland sterilization 
purser
fufu
palaver sauce
Arshloch