The Good Neighbor

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fred Rogers was one of a kind. He truly knew who he was and acted in kind ways in all aspects of his life. The writing is not the best, and I wish there would have been more insight into how it was to be his wife or child, but overall informative and inspiring.

View all my reviews

There are many people in the world who want to make children into performing seals. And as long as children can perform well, those adults will applaud. But I would much rather help a child to be able to say who he or she is.” 37

Ironically, John Rogers, the younger son, observed in an interview that “Maybe there was a little too much self-discipline in our family, for my brother and me. Meaning that we weren’t ready for the self-discipline that maybe was exuded upon us. . . . I often feel that—I don’t know if we want to use the term—the hammer should have come down a little harder; more limits should have been set


I’ll never forget the sense of wholeness I felt when I finally realized what I was—songwriter, telecommunicator, student of human development, language buff—but that all those things and more could be used in the service of children’s healthy growing. The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

“One of the major goals of education must be to help students discover a greater awareness of their own unique selves, in order to increase their feelings of personal worth, responsibility, and freedom.”

House of the Spirits

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Allende is a an amazing writer. The book spans four generations of Chileans. History mixed with magic, love, and violence. One of those epics that make you get lost in their world while you’re reading it.

View all my reviews

Wall of Storms

The Wall of Storms by Ken Liu
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I admit this isn’t as good as The Grace of King but I still have to give it 5 stars when I don’t want to stop reading at the end of the book. The book stalls a bit during the peaceful years but it ends with another climatic war with another round of technology, science, and strategy outwitting sheer brute power. Complex relationships, ambitions, and nail-biting action have me watching impatiently for the next installment.


View all my reviews

History is the long shadow cast by the past upon the future. Shadows, by nature, lack details.

Never underestimate the power of the need to appear better than their peers to motivate people, a tendency that I’m happy to indulge.

The cycle starts with the Year of the Plum, which is followed by the Cruben, the Orchid, the Whale, the Bamboo, the Carp, the Chrysanthemum, the Deer, the Pine, the Toad, the Coconut, and finally, the Wolf, before starting with the Plum again.

“True courage is to insist on seeing when all around you is darkness.”

What courage it took for the starving and the poor to continue the mere act of existence, of survival, of endurance. Such quiet acts of heroism were not celebrated, and yet they made up the foundation of civilization, far more than all the honorable sentiments of the Ano sages and the pretty words of the nobles.

Leaving Berlin

Leaving Berlin by Joseph Kanon
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Wonderfully captures the paranoia and repressive atmosphere of Berlin after WWII. Alex is set into an atmosphere of suspicion and threat, and manages to play sides off each other with incredible mental dexterity. What chess pieces he decides to move where and when will keep you hooked, and see if he can figure out who is playing him.


View all my reviews

A Better World

A Better World by Marcus Sakey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A pretty good follow up to Brilliance. Fast pacing, good characters. Suffers a bit from middle triology syndrome, where it feels like most of it is setting up stuff for the last book. Exciting, light read.


View all my reviews

The Romanovs

The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Since I knew only the most titillating bits of the Romanovs (Rasputin, the execution of the family), this was highly educational. Who knew that their reign began clear back in 1613, included Peter the Great and Catherine the Great? I didn’t. This book, while long, still spans 300+ years. Montefiore does this brilliantly. While there were some sentences in every chapter I couldn’t make sense of, he does a very respectable job in helping the reader follow a myriad of cousins, servants, lovers. He has multiple lists of characters at the beginning of each chapter and family lines at the beginning of each “act”, but I do wish he also included more maps. He does a good job following all the politics but focuses on some of the more scandalous and eccentric stories and anecdotes, but isn’t that what we all really want to know about anyway? Nice epilogue that shows how the Romanovs legacy still affects politics today. Also tons of pictures in the back.


View all my reviews

His brother Mikhail wittily expressed his “astonishment that a
               man of such excessive stupidity could still lose his mind.”
Alexander understood that “The most dangerous moment for a bad government is when
            it begins to reform,” as Alexis de Tocqueville had recently put it
Newspapers mushroomed. “I’ve never
            been greatly enamoured of writers in general,” Alexander confided to Bariatinsky,
            “and I’ve sadly concluded that they are a class of individuals with hidden motives
            and dangerous biases.”
The literary salons
            of Moscow became the battlefield of a debate on the nature of Russia itself between
            so-called “Westerners” and “Slavophiles.”
First, my orders would not be carried out unless they were the
            kind of orders that could be carried out
Rulers are often
            killed not for brutality but for inconsistency. 

The Subway Girls

The Subway Girls by Susie Orman Schnall
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was a tempidly interesting book about The Subway Girls, an advertising ploy that was like a mini pageant each month for girls in New York to sell advertising space on the subway in the 1950s. It also follows a professional woman working in advertising today. The point of the book is to show that although some opportunities have opened for women, there are still life choices women have to make concerning work and family. And though women are more often in jobs they weren’t 50 years ago, there is still plenty of biases and prejudices (as well as behaviors) that women still have to fight. It made an interesting jumping off point for book club, but it had immature writing with bad dialogue, questionable motivations, and forgettable plot line.

View all my reviews

What’s interesting to me,” Olivia said, “is that people today talk incessantly about work-life balance and making choices and sacrifices and blah, blah, blah, as if it’s something new that women have to deal with. But listening to all of you, I realize that’s just about being a woman. The times may have changed, but the identity crises we all go through don’t. The societal structures may have a new coat of paint, but they’re still the same impenetrable walls and ceilings underneath that modern gloss. And we’re still expected to do much more than any of us is capable of doing.”